


I Believe You Liar

by soundczechfic



Category: Johnny's Entertainment, Jpop, KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Community: jent_bigbang, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-20 02:11:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 57,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10652778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soundczechfic/pseuds/soundczechfic
Summary: Johnny forces Jin and Kame to hang out in the wake of Jin's departure from KAT-TUN.





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Written for jent_bigbang and originally posted 27 January 2011. 
> 
> Title taken from the Washington song. When I first started writing this, 2011 seemed REALLY REALLY FAR AWAY and I was like, of course Jin will have singles and albums by then, and wrote under that presumption. Then he did not. So you're just going to have to rewrite history mentally, ok. Thanks to darlita, samenashi, and ayuzak for all their help ♥ and to the jent_bigbang mods for all their work and patience.

_I sing every song I've ever sung  
from what we were to what we'll become...   
and full of hope and electricity   
Now I let you make a man of me._   
  


—

_Akanishi Jin has returned to Tokyo after spending several months in the States promoting his first US single, **Yellow Gold** , which achieved an impressive top 40 ranking on the Billboard R&B Charts. Representatives of Johnny & Associates say they are pleased with his success and are proud to welcome him back home, where he will be working on the follow up to last November’s smash hit album, **Akanishi Jin: The Greatest**.   
  
Despite Akanishi’s professional success, he is still plagued by gossip about difficulties in his personal life, including tabloid speculation about promiscuity, substance abuse, and sour relations with former bandmates and other agency insiders. The agency categorically denies all rumours._   
–Tokyohive, February 2011  
  
—  
  
The office is quiet at this time of night. There’s a janitor in the stairwell who sheepishly hides his cigarette behind his back as Jin passes, but other than that the halls are deserted, doors hanging open to reveal empty offices shuttered and dark. It’s creepy, really. Emptied of the juniors and the make up artists, the costume girls and the harried, neurotic looking managers, this place seems full of ghosts.   
  
Makino-san ushers Jin into Johnny’s office and disappears back into the barren halls, promising to be back with some drinks.   
  
Kame glances over his shoulder as Jin stumbles into the office, and Jin sees his brow rumple with slight confusion before it is cleanly wiped away, effortlessly hidden in that way that Kame seems to have mastered over the years. Jin has never learned the art.  
  
“Hey,” Kame says, as if this is normal and they haven’t both just been summoned into Johnny’s office closer to the crack of dawn than the dead of night. He’s wearing a dark suit with a tie pulled close to undone, his hair still super idol coiffed. He was probably working before he came here. Jin was sleeping.   
  
It’s the first time Jin has seen him since the hesitant going away party the group had thrown after their very last performance together, really just six cans of beer and some conbini cake in their dressing room. It’s been a year, maybe. Jin feels like he should say something good.  
  
“Long time no see,” he says instead, and eases himself into the chair at Kame’s side. The chair behind Johnny’s desk is empty; Jin wonders where he is, but it’s no good to ask. They’ll wait until Johnny is good and ready, even if it is after two in the morning. Jin tries to peer at the notes on the desk but they all seem to be about Matsumoto Jun’s hairstyle, and Jin can’t really see how that would bring them into the office at this hour. He looks at Kame. “What’s going on?”  
  
Kame shrugs. “I don’t know either.”   
  
The idea that Kame is clueless makes Jin really nervous. Kame has a network of spies within the jimusho – or maybe just a network of admin types who have a crush on him, Jin’s never really been sure. However he gets the info, he gets it. When Kame is surprised by something, it’s usually bad news. Bad news handed down from the top.   
  
“Any guesses?” Jin asks hopefully.  
  
“I did have before you walked in,” Kame says, grim faced. “Now, who the hell knows.”   
  
Jin picks a snow globe up from Johnny’s desk and shakes it, watching the tiny plastic flakes bloom and swirl around the little penguin trapped inside. The office is totally silent, but in the distance Jin can hear the whirr of a vacuum cleaner and the occasional bubble of a water cooler. He tries to think of something to say to Kame but comes up empty; it would be hard enough in the outside world, but in this room it is impossible.   
  
Occasionally, he thinks he feels Kame’s eyes on him, but when he glances over Kame is staring down at his nails, which aren’t black chipped or sparkling like they should be, but bare and neat like an average guy.   
  
Johnny comes in after fifteen minutes, wearing his pyjamas beneath a grey towelling robe. Jin looks at Kame out of the corner of his eye, hoping to see amusement to match his own. Kame’s mouth is very small and thin, hopefully with hilarity.   
  
“I’ve discovered the solution to all our problems,” Johnny says without preamble. He sinks into his chair and reaches into his drawer for a pack of cigarettes. Johnny smokes some weird French brand. He doesn’t offer them one. Nor does he seem as if he’s going to explain what problems he feels they have.   
  
“Sir?” Kame asks, hands politely folded in his lap, now.   
  
“You are going to be friends again,” he says, jabbing in their direction with his cigarette, now slowly curling smoke into the air. “AKAKAME LIVES.”   
  
“Eh?” Jin exclaims, and looks across at Kame for help, but finds nothing but a smooth, blank face. A vault.   
  
“Go out and get caught by the paparazzi,” Johnny says, cigarette now firmly clamped in his mouth. “That’s an order.”  
  
“Johnny,” Jin starts.   
  
“This conversation doesn’t leave this room.” Johnny looks at Kame. “Not even Takahashi-san, you hear me?”   
  
Takahashi is Kame’s squat middle-aged manager; the most boring man Jin has ever met. Why it would matter if he found out that they’re – what, fraudulently rekindling their childhood friendship? - is anyone’s guess.   
  
“ _Johnny_ ,” Jin repeats more forcefully, but Kame just bows his head and says, “Yes sir.”  
  
“This is bullshit,” Jin says.  
  
Johnny laughs at him. “Get out of here,” he says. “I’m an old man. I need my rest.”   
  
—  
  
The first thing Jin does is tell Josh. Before he’s even out of the car park, before he’s even put the key into the ignition, his phone is glued to his ear and Josh is expressing his disbelief. Telling Josh stuff is comforting because he’s still naïve enough about the world Jin lives in to be surprised or outraged about things. Most of Jin’s Japanese friends would just say, _yeah, and?_  
  
“The old man has really lost it this time,” Josh says just as the elevator doors open and Kamenashi strolls out and into the basement parking garage.   
  
“I know,” Jin says. He watches as Kame remotely unlocks a gleaming black sports car that Jin’s never seen before. He’s wearing a hat now, pulled low and suspicious like a film noir detective. Once Jin had probably been closer to Kame than anyone else in his life, but now it’s like he really could be a character in a bad movie, a one dimensional caricature that vanishes whenever he moves out of Jin’s line of vision.   
  
As if Kame senses him watching, he looks up and catches sight of Jin in his car. He raises one hand and sort of half-heartedly waves before getting into his sleek, fancy car, disappearing behind tinted windows. Ceasing to exist.   
  
—  
  
Kame is already shedding his clothes as he lets himself into the apartment, shoes haphazardly abandoned in the entrance, tie pulled loose and draped over the umbrella stand. He leaves every piece of his suit in a different room of the house, then collapses on the couch in his underwear and socks. He wants a beer but it’s been a long day and the fridge is really far away.   
  
He grabs a banana from the fruit bowl on the table instead. The skin is starting to break out in black splodges, probably just this side of edible. Sometimes his mother comes over and leaves food in his apartment while he’s gone; he keeps trying to tell her to stop because half the time he’s gone for so long that the food goes rotten in his absence. He wonders if his fridge is full of mouldy cheese and toxic stew.   
  
He doesn’t know what to think about Johnny’s orders, so he tries not to. He’d been a bit offended at the horrified look on Akanishi’s face, honestly; it’s been a long time since they were what anyone would call close friends, but he thought things had been a bit better, the last few years. Good enough that they could talk, sometimes, about meaningless things, mutual friends and new music and foreign politics. Good enough that sometimes they could laugh together and Jin would crack and smile at him honestly, the distance between them momentarily breached.   
  
It seems almost a year of absence has not made the heart grow fonder.   
  
_Whatever,_ Kame thinks, and bites into his banana.   
  
—  
  
It takes almost a week and a half for them to find a simultaneous gap in their schedules; Jin ends up grudgingly delaying his planned weekend trip to Korea with the boys because otherwise it might be another twenty years until they find another gap between Kamenashi’s photoshoots and production meetings and promotional spots.   
  
They meet at a Starbucks not far from the Jimusho, where the paparazzi should already be sniffing around, looking for a bunch of juniors chatting up girls or maybe a stray member of SMAP just trying to get a caffeine hit. Jin walks in uncharacteristically early; he doesn’t see anyone he recognises when he looks around, so he orders a grande pumpkin spice latte and slumps into an armchair to play Angry Birds on his iPhone.   
  
Kamenashi is late, which gives Jin time to start fidgeting. He keeps hoping he’ll get a message calling the whole thing off. He’s not nervous about seeing him, he tells himself, he’s just dreading how totally boring this afternoon is going to be. He should have brought Josh or someone along for the ride, to fill in the gaps between Kamenashi’s bitching and nagging.   
  
He’s just considering sending Josh a message and ordering him to get his ass here now when Kamenashi finally walks in, practically unrecognisable in a dark baseball cap and baggy jacket, collar angled to hide part of his face. Jin recognises him from the way he moves, the gentle sway of his hips as he walks, but nobody else seems to notice his entrance. Jin had been spotted the second he walked in and small clusters of teenage girls have been tittering ever since.   
  
“You suck at being conspicuous,” Jin says when Kamenashi arrives in front of him. “Take off your disguise, 007.”   
  
“I came on the subway,” Kamenashi says. As he pulls off his glasses and hat one of the girls that has been blatantly spying on Jin makes a choking, shrieking noise that Kamenashi tries to pretend not to hear, but Jin sees the slight twitch of his mouth. He knows Kamenashi secretly enjoys getting hysterical reactions. They mostly make Jin uncomfortable.  
  
Jin is starting to feel irritated already. “Nice to see you could deign to make an appearance,” he snips.   
  
Kamenashi rolls his eyes and sits. “Like I said, I took the subway.” He pulls off his scarf and runs a hand through his hair, leaving it messier and more rumpled than before. “I’m sorry.”   
  
“Right,” Jin says. He inhales, spine drawing up straight, fists on his knees. His cheeks puff with air. He can’t think of anything else to say. “This is uncomfortable.”   
  
Kamenashi slumps in his chair, elbows sticking out and legs sprawled. “It’s not so bad.”   
  
Jin prods at what is left of his latte with a spoon, then pushes the paper cup away. It’s cold. “I knew the old man was going senile, but this is nuts even for him.”  
  
“I’ve been called into his office in the middle of the night for worse,” Kame says, eyes on his hands rather than Jin’s face.   
  
Jin snorts; he can barely resist making some joke about booty calls that will inevitably just trigger an insane bitchfit; a tabloid story about Kamenashi dumping his coffee on his head and storming out of Starbucks is not going to help either of them.  
  
“Like what?” he asks instead.  
  
Kamenashi just shrugs and says, “Let’s see a movie.”   
  
—  
  
Sitting in a movie theatre at least means they don’t have to talk. Jin buys popcorn and is a bit surprised when Kamenashi basically eats it all until Jin shifts it into the crook of his other elbow, too far away for him to reach.   
  
“Stingy,” Kame mutters, slumping to his other side, opening up a valley between them. Halfway through the movie Jin feels a bit bad and shoves the popcorn back between them, but Kame ignores it, cheek resting on his fist, eyes fixed resolutely on the boobs and explosions that make up the bulk of the movie. Every time Jin looks over at him he feels his own rancour grow.  
  
When it is over they sit through most of the credits because Kame wants to know who did the make up or score or stunt co-ordination or some shit. Jin checks his email, forwarding a bunch of dirty jokes from Josh to Pi.   
  
Against Jin’s better judgment, he offers Kame a lift home, mostly because his mother’s voice is in his ear reminding him to be generous and polite. She always liked Kamenashi. She never understood what happened between them. If Jin thinks about it too much he doesn’t understand either.  
  
In the car, Kame tries to prod Jin into offering an opinion on the movie, but Jin can’t bring himself to agree when Kame starts talking about how awesome the effects were, illustrating the spectacular motorcycle crash with his hands, even though he agrees. He just shrugs and says, “It was okay, I guess.” He flicks on the wipers as they drive out of the garage and fat splodges of rain hit the windscreen. “If you’re into that kind of thing.”  
  
Kame looks at him with exaggerated disbelief, meeting Jin’s hostility with a small, cajoling smile. “You love that kind of thing.”  
  
Jin snorts. “How would you know?”   
  
His stupid little smile doesn’t disappear, but Jin sees it freeze and turn artificial. He tries to reel back his own antagonism, but it’s too late, he feels grumpy and angry and he still doesn’t understand why the fuck they have to do this, or how Kamenashi can accept it so easily. Now that they’re alone behind Jin’s tinted windows, he can’t muster up the energy to hide.   
  
“Well,” Kamenashi says finally, collecting himself. “I thought it was awesome.”   
  
“You’d think anything was awesome if management told you to,” Jin says. He pulls up at the stop light and is horrified to see that they are basically stuck in a glorified car park. Lines of cars stretch into the distance, barely moving.   
  
Kame sighs. His left leg is trembling slightly, a sure sign of agitation. “Is there something you want to say to me?” he asks.   
  
“No,” Jin says. He jabs the radio on angrily, hissing when _Real Face_ blares out because the universe hates him that much. Kame turns his face away as Jin switches the stereo over to CD and Lil Wayne interrupts Koki mid-sentence.   
  
“Come on,” Kamenashi announces after a minute, his voice low and flat. “You won’t have a better opportunity than this.”  
  
“Fine,” Jin grips the steering wheel. “I don’t understand how you can just accept this.”   
  
“It’s just work,” Kame says finally, sliding his sunglasses on and staring out the window.  
  
Jin laughs without amusement. “That’s your answer to everything.”   
  
Kame’s fingers trace a hole high up in the thigh of his jeans. “It’s the only answer I have.”  
  
“So what, anything is okay for work?” Jin spits. “That’s all that matters to you? Lying and cheating and using people, all that’s fine, as long as Kamenashi Kazuya keeps his name up in lights?”  
  
His body language is shutting Jin out completely; Jin is dimly aware that he’s going too far, but it feels impossible to resent the boiling resentment that is bubbling up in his throat. He wants to call Kamenashi names just to see them hurt.   
  
“I don’t understand where this is coming from,” Kame says finally, that rough, serious voice familiar from the many times that Kamenashi had to sit KAT-TUN down and tell them how things were. When he had to nag them into line. “It’s been years since…” He takes a breath, as if reaching inside himself to deal with Jin’s immaturity. “I just don’t understand why you’re suddenly so angry.”   
  
“I don’t like liars,” Jin says. “And I don’t like that you’re turning me into one.”  
  
“I’m not turning you into anything,” Kamenashi objects. “You make your own choices. If you want this to stop then whatever, go to Johnny and tell him that yourself. But for me…” The hole in his jeans keeps getting bigger where Kame is tearing away the threads. “There are things I want to protect, and that means…” He wraps his hands together in one big joined fist and presses it between his knees, shoulders drawing up uncomfortably. “Integrity is a luxury that I can’t afford.”  
  
“You want to protect yourself, you mean,” Jin accuses, but Kame isn’t responding to him anymore. When Jin pulls up to the address Kame gave him, he bows his thanks and gets out without a word. As Jin pulls away from the curb, he can’t help but watch Kamenashi in the rear view mirror, getting smaller and more remote by the second.   
  
—  
  
“Maybe you’re like his beard,” Josh says, swigging from a beer bottle. They’re sitting on Jin’s balcony looking out over the Roppongi Hills, feet propped up on the railing. “Like Tom Cruise’s wives. Only instead of making him look straight, you’re supposed to be making him look cool.”   
  
Jin giggles. “Nothing could make Kamenashi look cool.”  
  
Josh waves his cigarette in the air. They’ve been sitting here drinking and coming up with theories for about an hour, and Jin is relieved to feel that hysterical tension leaking out of him. He feels kind of exhausted. “No seriously, it’s like, “Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!”   
  
Jin stares at him blankly.  
  
“That’s a _Star Wars_ reference,” Josh says helpfully.  
  
Jin flicks his beer bottle lid off the table. “So I’m like Harrison Ford?”  
  
“No, retard, that’s Han Solo.” He stubs out the cigarette. “Obi Wan Kenobi is a Jedi. You’re like the Jedi Master of being cool.”   
  
“And what’s Kamenashi, Darth Vader?” Jin can imagine Kame flouncing around in that black cape and mask pretty easily, actually. It could be the concept for KAT-TUN’s next PV.   
  
“No way, that would mean he was like, the coolest.” Josh swings back on his chair thoughtfully. “I think he’s C3PO.”   
  
“Huh?” Jin tries to think back. He’d last seen Star Wars when he was about eight years old, and while his memory is that it was awesome, he doesn’t exactly have the cast list memorised. “Is that the little round robot?”  
  
Josh shakes his head seriously. “No, it’s the faggy gold one.”   
  
Jin cracks up.  
  
—  
  
The second time they meet, it takes Kame more than hour to get ready because suddenly every item of clothing he owns seems to say he is the kind of person Jin apparently thinks he is. He’s not really sure what clothes have to do with it, but he can’t stop thinking of the disgusted look on Jin’s face as he questioned Kame’s integrity, and the memory makes him cast aside expensive cashmere t-shirts and silk sweaters, designer flannel shirts and a hoodie with his own name emblazoned on it in diamantes. He knows there is nothing he can do to pass Jin’s judgment, but he feels the terrifying urge to make himself as non-descript as possible. If he can dress all dull and beige and boring then maybe Jin won’t even notice he’s there and he’ll be able to escape this whole ordeal with his dignity intact.   
  
In the end he gets so fed up with himself that he just grabs the first t-shirt his hand falls on – a ¥40,000 gift from a designer – and stomps angrily into his favourite Gucci boots, wondering when he started trying to win Jin over again. He’s not supposed to care about this stuff anymore. It’s been years since he has put any serious effort into mending that bridge, after every tentative reparative gesture was met with stubborn resilience or outright hostility. He’s not about to kill himself trying now.   
  
He just has to keep reminding himself that there’s no use in chasing lost causes.   
  
—  
  
He’s not exactly surprised to walk into their private room in the yakiniku restaurant Jin had chosen to find him with a group of five or six of his foreigner friends. Whatever Jin thinks, they’ve known each other long enough now that Kame has a fairly good understanding of how Jin’s brain works, and he knows that from now on Jin will do anything possible to follow Johnny’s orders to the letter without really following them at all.  
  
Kame vaguely recognises the blond guy – Josh – from some photos Nakamaru had shown him of Jin’s bon voyage concert the year before, but the others are total strangers that Jin introduces so quickly Kame gives up trying to remember their names. He nods and bows politely, taking the empty seat at the end of the table beside a guy who, at least, gives him a broad, friendly smile before turning back to the conversation.   
  
Everyone is laughing and talking in English and as much as Kame tries to focus on the conversation, he can only pick up the general gist of the chatter sporadically; at first it seems like they’re talking about women, but then they might be talking about cars, or travel, or movies. He hears words he recognises but after a while they cease to mean anything to him and he stops even trying to pay attention, focusing instead on grilling the meat, watching the bright blood red of the beef slowly turn brown.   
  
Once the meat is cooked and everyone is stuffing their faces, Kame finds himself watching Jin, feeling delighted, even in his exclusion, to see Jin smiling and laughing and happy. Sometimes Jin looks over and, as if remembering he is there suddenly, like a shock to the system, his eyes go dark and grumpy, the expression to which Kame has grown accustomed. It only ever lasts for the split second that he meets Kame’s eyes.   
  
While they’re eating, the guy at Kame’s side turns and tries to engage him in conversation; his Japanese is terrible, but Kame appreciates that he is trying at the very least. His name is Peter and he is from Chicago. He is one of Jin’s dancers. That is the most information that Kame gets before Jin interrupts them loudly, asking Peter something obnoxious in English that makes everybody laugh.  
  
Kame rests his chin in his hand and draws patterns in the condensation on his soda glass. He wonders if it would be rude to go home early and go to bed. Johnny has pulled some kind of shady manoeuvre to clear up Kame’s schedule enough to give him time to go on these stupid outings with Jin, but apparently did not see fit to make any more time than usual for Kame to sleep.   
  
He closes his eyes and thinks of all the things he could have done with this evening that would have been better than sitting here and being forthrightly ignored by his former best friend.  
  
Laundry. Watching TV. Going to the batting cages, maybe, and working out some of his aggression. Finally giving his mother her birthday present. Sleeping. Sleeping. Sleeping. Returning all the messages on his voicemail from people who actually like him. Painting his living room wall red like he has been planning for more than a year. Reading any one of the stack of scripts that are perpetually piling up in the passenger seat of his car. Anything.   
  
When he opens his eyes Jin is staring at him, ignoring everything that is going on around him. At Jin’s side Josh is telling an animated story with his hands. He could be talking about elephants and spaceships for all Kame understands.   
  
“Excuse me,” Kame says, standing up. “I have to make a call.”  
  
Peter waves as he leaves, but no-one else seems to notice, except Jin, whose disinterest is so exaggerated as to be totally falsified.  
  
There’s a balcony attached to the back of the restaurant. Kame slips out and sneaks a cigarette, leaning on the wall. A cat jumps down from the roof of the neighbouring building and he crouches to scratch it behind the ears, laughing when it rolls over onto its back and purrs.  
  
When Kame comes back, the room is empty; only the dirty dishes and a half-full jug of beer are left. A waitress is standing in the doorway, eyes huge and panicked and leather folder held tightly between her two tiny hands.  
  
“Excuse me, sir, Akanishi-sama said you were going to get the bill,” she says, and Kame almost laughs. Of course he did.   
  
“My friends had to work,” Kame explains politely, and reaches out to take the folder, looking down at the bill as she shuffles away. ¥75,435.   
  
Kame sighs and slips his credit card into the book.  
  
—  
  
 **@tokyojosh:** BESSSSSSSSSSSSSSST YAKINIKU TODAY. Thanks Kamenashi lol _24 March_  
  
—  
  
Jin feels kind of bad about stiffing Kamenashi with the bill, but only after Josh tells Kusano and he sees the slightly horrified expression on his face. They’re sitting on Jin’s living room floor eating pizza that JIN PAID FOR but Kusano is looking at Jin like he’s some kind of monster.   
  
“Dude…” Kusano says, pizza dangling halfway to his mouth, as if he has forgotten about it.   
  
“Shut up,” Jin says. “Don’t judge me.”  
  
Kusano finally remembers the pizza in his hand and stuffs it in his mouth. He talks around a gobful of cheese and salami. “That’s pretty harsh, dude.”   
  
Jin shoves his pizza away angrily, suddenly not at all hungry. “I thought I said to shut up.”   
  
“It was funny,” Josh offers defensively. “It’s not like he’s our friend.”  
  
“But–“ Kusano starts, cutting off abruptly when Jin gets up and storms into the kitchen to get another beer. Jin pops the can and then angrily drags his iPhone out of his pocket, sending Kame a message:  
  
 _ill pay u back for the yakuniku_  
  
Kame doesn’t reply for six hours, until 3am:  
  
 _Don’t worry about it._  
  
Somehow, it just makes Jin angry again.  
  
—  
  
Kame’s manager drops the paper into Kame’s lap when he climbs into the car after the taping of _Going_ on Sunday night. Kame picks it up and turns to the page Takahashi has dogeared. There’s a blurry, indistinct photograph of himself in line for tickets at the cinema, and another of him standing an arm’s length away from Jin, stealing a handful of popcorn as they waited for the theatre to open. The headline is huge and red; _AkaKame reunites?_ The article speculates that Jin’s absence from KAT-TUN has somehow helped them rekindle a friendship torn apart by professional differences.   
  
Takahashi’s face is grim. “It’s best if you don’t associate with Akanishi-san.”  
  
Kame folds the paper and tucks it into his messenger bag. “Oh?”  
  
“We’ve worked so hard to keep your reputation clean,” Takahashi says. “That guy is toxic.”  
  
Kame bristles. “That’s not true.”  
  
“It is as far as senior management is concerned.” Takahashi takes off his glasses to clean them, looking away from Kame the way he does whenever Kame digs in his heels about something and refuses to move. “There are some who don’t understand why Johnny-san is going out of his way for such a rude and ungrateful brat.” He replaces his glasses. “It’s best for you to stay out of the line of fire.”   
  
Kame looks out the window. “My social life is none of your business.”  
  
—  
  
Jin blows off four appointments with Kame – three because he can’t be bothered, and one just to be a dick – before they finally meet about two weeks after the yakiniku incident. They’re supposed to play minigolf but Kame shows up wearing a suit and says they’re going to lunch at his friend’s place instead. They drive about an hour and a half outside of Tokyo and Kame gets lost three times trying to find the sprawling property; his GPS is broken and Jin ends up having to navigate using his phone. It’s actually good because otherwise Kamenashi might keep trying to make the same awkward, careful conversation he was attempting in the city.   
  
Kame’s friend turns out to be some rich old tycoon and an oddball assortment of guests almost comically ranging in age and personality. Kame and Jin sit with a 40 year old racehorse owner named Yuuko. She and Kame seem to know each other well; she keeps calling him Kazu-chan and asking him questions about random mutual acquaintances. Jin’s not sure when Kame has time to make all these weird friends, but this lady at least seems interesting. After lunch, while they’re drinking coffee, Kamenashi wanders off to talk to the host and Yuuko begins telling Jin stories about her travels all over the world. She’d be hot if she was just five years younger. 40 is a bit too close to his mother’s age.   
  
He goes looking for Kame when she excuses herself to take a phone call, and finds him sitting in another room with the tycoon’s daughter Ayumi, bent over a magazine spread of MatsuJun in a wet white t-shirt. The walls are covered in Arashi posters. They’re laughing, and Jin stands just outside the room for a moment, the sound of Kame’s genuine giggles enough to jolt him off guard for a moment.   
  
“Is Akanishi really like they say?” Ayumi asks as they flip to Jin’s spread. He feels his cheeks burn as he looks at himself spread provocatively along a leather couch. It’s embarrassing.   
  
“Like what?” Kame replies.   
  
“You know,” she says, and her voice drops to a whisper. “A bad guy.”   
  
“No way,” Kame says. “He’s nice, you should go talk to him.”   
  
“You should have brought Matsumoto-san instead,” she whines.  
  
“I think Jin’s better than Matsumoto-san,” Kame says.   
  
“Why?” Ayumi asks.  
  
That’s when Kame laughs again. “I’m probably biased,” he admits. “He’s one of my oldest friends.”  
  
Jin stomps off. He’s relieved to find Yuuko standing with some architect. When she leaves he asks if she’d mind giving him a lift back to the city. On the way home he fantasises about fucking her in the back seat, maybe stopping and spending the weekend at one of the ryokan they pass on the way home, just to distract himself from the dull, painful throbbing in his stomach that he doesn’t understand.   
  
—  
  
The articles about their reconciliation become more frequent, illustrated with creepy photos taken through the windows of coffee shops and car windows. They meet up at least once a week. Jin tries to bring his friends along wherever possible; he doesn’t know if he can spend another hour sitting alone with Kame without scratching his eyes out.   
  
The truth is, he’s trying to be good, but whenever Jin tries to do something that he doesn’t really want to he fails miserably. He knows he’s being a dick and that Kamenashi’s seemingly infinite patience is probably wearing thin, but he really can’t help it and he doesn’t know why. He’d been angry at Kame once, a long time ago, but he considers that to be a different life, a different person. He’s not that battered, lonely kid anymore, blindsided by the sudden abandonment.  
  
He’s above this shit.   
  
He just has to figure out a way to remember that every time he looks at Kamenashi’s stupid, traitorous face.   
  
—  
  
Kamenashi’s patience really is wearing thin. He spends half his time with Jin mentally counting to ten, twenty, thirty, three hundred, three thousand, though he’s not sure if he’s going to throw a punch or burst into frustrated tears. He’s tired and stressed and tired of punishing himself and being punished for something that happened when he was nineteen years old, something that spiralled so wildly out of his control. They’re adults now. At some point, they’re just going to have to get over it.   
  
He’d actually been under the impression that Jin got over it years ago; one minute he’d sworn Kame was somehow simultaneously dead to him and his sworn nemesis, then he was leaving for Los Angeles. He came back as a different person, with all these new friends and hobbies. A distant, moody stranger impossibly out of Kame’s reach, but polite, at least. Friendly but remote.  
  
Kame should probably be happy that his childish, vindictive best friend is still in there somewhere, pushing angrily at whatever prison Jin had wrangled him into. Arms flailing wildly through the bars to swipe scratches in Kame’s skin. The angry little monster inside.   
  
It should make him happy, but it doesn’t. All these years, and Jin is still furious.  
  
—  
  
Kame goes to a dingy club in Roppongi with Jin and what seems like about three dozen of his closest friends. The bar is full of foreigners that don’t really notice him as he passes. He has vague memories of coming here with Jin when they were teenagers, underage and ducking in the back entrance. It doesn’t really surprise him that Jin is still coming to the same place. Jin is, for all his posturing, essentially a loyal creature of habit. He’ll probably go to that same club until the day he dies.  
  
Jin grunts hello as he arrives, his attention instantly diverted by the tall, slim redhead he keeps buying drinks for. Jin spends most of the night ignoring him, but the dancer Kame remembers from the yakiniku incident – Peter – spots him and pulls him into a group of people that keep offering him champagne and shots of vodka. They’re all noisy and laughing and for once don’t seem to realise that he’s supposed to be a social leper, so he keeps taking whatever they offer him, feeling himself getting louder and funnier himself.   
  
He ends up curled into the corner of a couch, feeling a bit giddy and leaning against Peter’s muscular shoulder because he’s too fucked up to sit straight. He watches Jin while everyone is talking; masochistically lingering on the gentleness of his smile and the way he leans just a little into the girl’s space. They haven’t slept together, he can tell. She doesn’t quite return Jin’s attention, listening to her friend’s stories rather than returning Jin’s avid gaze.   
  
She’s beautiful, he supposes. If you’re into that kind of thing.  
  
—  
  
Jin wakes up in a foul mood. There’s a warm body in the bed next to him but it’s not Kelly like he’d been angling for, it’s Kusano, fully dressed and drooling into Jin’s shoulder. Jin shoves him aside and crawls out of bed in search of coffee. He’d barely had anything to drink last night, but somehow his head still aches and his mouth tastes like stale beer. There’s no coffee left and he wonders if it is too douchey to shake Kusano awake and make him run out to the conbini to get some. Probably, but he’s tempted anyway. Instead, he sits at his kitchen table rubbing his eyes and swigging flat Coke from a week-old bottle.   
  
At the end of last night he’d been the only person sober enough to get Kamenashi home in a cab, and he’d had to drag him up to his apartment with an arm around his shoulder. That guy was surprisingly heavy now, a solid sack of muscle and flesh insolently hanging from Jin’s neck. He’d collapsed into bed when Jin shoved him, whimpering slightly as the room span around him.   
  
“Wait,” he’d slurred, reaching out to grab Jin’s wrist.  
  
“What?” Jin snapped. “Do you need a bucket?”   
  
“NO,” Kame said.   
  
“Spit it out,” Jin said, “The meter’s running.”  
  
“I’m TRYING,” Kame rolled into his pillow, face smushed and hair already in disarray. He reeked of cigarettes and spilled beer, a shock of stinkiness in this pleasantly perfumed apartment. “YOU KEEP INTERRUPTING.”  
  
“Jesus, you’re wasted,” Jin said, yanking his arm from Kame’s grasp. “I’m going.”  
  
“I don’t understand how you can hate me so much,” Kame whined. Jin paused in the doorway, the frail, scratchy note in Kame’s voice making his stomach turn over with guilt. “I just don’t understand how you do it.” He rolled over onto his back, eyes red and bloodshot. He was still wearing his boots. They rubbed black marks on his sheets. “I can’t,” he said “No matter what you do to me, I can’t.”  
  
“Maybe you should have thought of that before–“ Jin exploded, but he couldn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t even know how.   
  
“Jin,” Kame said miserably, but Jin was already walking out the door.   
  
—  
  
Kame is on the shinkansen headed for Sendai when Jin calls. He’s grateful that shinkansen etiquette gives him an excuse to reject the call; his head is throbbing and his throat is hoarse and he doesn’t quite remember what he said to Jin to make him storm out of his apartment, but it was probably pathetic.   
  
The phone keeps ringing over and over, vibrations causing a dentist’s drill buzz on the tray table. Kame takes the phone and shoves it in his pocket. He pulls his hood up and tries to bury his face inside it, slumping against the window. At first he tries to sleep but when he can’t he opens his eyes and stares at the passing scenery, the buildings and billboards that sidle up to the railway lines. He wishes he’d stopped on his way to get something greasy and disgusting to eat. He feels queasy.   
  
Jin sends him an email that says, _FUCKER! Answer your phone!_ and Kame barely stops himself from sending back a torrent of abuse. He doesn’t understand how he can be so thoroughly cast out of Jin’s good graces yet still be expected to be available to him 24/7. He’s a busy guy. There are people that have to wait a month for Kamenashi Kazuya to return a phone call.   
  
It only takes him a few hours to return Jin’s call, after he’s interviewed half the team and buttered up the coach a bit just because he can. He still feels hungover so he bums a cig from the boom guy. He sits crosslegged in the outfield, staring up at the early spring sun. The players are doing jumping jacks on the other side of the field, sweating and panting. Sometimes, Kame’s really glad he gave up on his olympic dreams. When he’s feeling lazy. His own job is hard work a lot of the time but it is offset by the long stretches in which he just has to stand around and look pretty.   
  
He rests his head in his hand as the phone rings, dread prickling the skin on the inside of his wrists. He’s not entirely sure what he’s done to raise Jin’s ire now, but he’s got more than a dozen missed calls which would have been nuts even when they were inseparable.   
  
“You really couldn’t resist,” Jin spits the second he answers the phone.   
  
Kame absently tugs up a few blades of grass. He doesn’t know what Jin is talking about, which will probably just make Jin angrier. “Huh?” he asks after a while.  
  
“Did you do it just to piss me off?” Jin’s anger is doing a pretty good job of covering his whining, but Kame hears it, the petulant little kid that still doesn’t really understand why everything can’t always go his own way.   
  
Kame rubs his forehead, feeling the low nauseous thud of his hangover returning with strength. “I still don’t know what we’re talking about,” he admits finally.   
  
“Don’t give me that,” Jin scoffs.  
  
“I’m serious,” Kame insists. “If you wanna fight about this you’re going to have to fill me in because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”  
  
Jin snaps, “Kelly!”   
  
“I don’t know who that is,” Kame says.   
  
“KELLY,” Jin repeats more forcefully.   
  
“Is that the redhead you were tracking like a stalker last night?” He takes Jin’s hiss as confirmation. “I don’t even remember talking to her.”   
  
“Then why is she asking me about my ‘friend’ Kamenashi?” Jin asks suspiciously.   
  
“I don’t know,” Kame says.   
  
Jin is implacable. “I don’t believe you.”  
  
Kame breathes quietly for a minute, nonplussed. He’s not exactly Kinsey 6 gay, but he’s getting there, and he thought Jin knew that. It’s not like he’s been hiding it; he never made a big deal about coming out or anything but Jin has met two of his ex-boyfriends and Kame never tried to hide that that is what they were. The idea that Jin really didn’t know has never occurred to him.   
  
Finally, he says, “I’m into guys, retard.”   
  
He almost enjoys the silence that ensues, followed by Jin’s small, quiet, “Eh?”  
  
“You can have Kelly,” Kame says. “I’m not interested.”   
  
“Did you just come out to me?” Jin asks.  
  
“Well,” Kame says. “I thought I did that like four years ago, but apparently you missed it.”   
  
“What?” Jin says.   
  
The team are starting to wind up their training, so Kame gets up and dusts off his suit pants. “I have to go,” Kame says, and hangs up.   
  
—  
  
Jin sits on his couch with his phone in his hand for like five minutes after that. It’s not that it’s a shock, exactly; he’d wondered about Kame in the past, even when they were really young. It’s been a long time since he really thought about it. Kamenashi flirts with women all the time. Jin doesn’t understand why he expends the effort if he’s not planning on any follow through.  
  
He slumps on the couch, deflated. He’d felt so furious a few minutes ago, having spent almost a full day mentally replaying Kelly’s questions about Kame, oh-so-casually phrased and delivered practically first thing this morning as if she couldn’t possibly wait until a decent hour to find out all about her future husband. Now he doesn’t know quite what to do; he still feels angry, even if he shouldn’t. He still wants some kind of revenge. He wants to go back in time and stop Kelly from meeting Kamenashi so he doesn’t have to face the thought that maybe she’s just not all that into him. She’d rather some lame-o instead. Some gay lame-o.   
  
Jin’s life sucks.   
  
—  
  
Jin hates photoshoots most of the time, especially now that he is all on his own. He’d never given and serious thought to how much he’d actually miss Taguchi or any of those other retards, but whenever he has to sit around a studio alone, trussed up in uncomfortable clothes and slathered in disgusting orange make-up, he can’t help but think about how much faster the time would go if Taguchi was sitting next to him in a matching ugly cumberband, telling his stupid jokes. It’s been months since he spoke to anyone but Nakamaru. And Kamenashi, he supposes. If that counts.  
  
The _Wink Up_ staff press a few issues of their own magazine into his hands, bowing and grovelling apologetically because the photographer is stuck in traffic. Jin flips through the pages, skipping any that have his face on them. He reads an interview with News and sends Pi an email to mock him about its contents.   
  
He almost flips straight past the interview with Kamenashi until he spots his own name in tiny font. He reads with some trepidation, half expecting that Kame may have gotten fed up and exposed is treachery to the loyal Wink Up readers. There’s no trace of anger in Kame’s words, though, just a casual account of eating yakiniku with Akanishi and his friends. Heavily censored, like reading a top secret document in which all the most interesting bits have been redacted. Akanishi. Friends. Meat. Fun.  
  
It makes Jin feel worse than if Kamenashi had revealed the truth.   
  
—  
  
Kame hasn’t told anyone about the arrangement, not even the other members. He tries not to break Johnny’s rules unless it’s absolutely necessary, always, in the back of his mind, aware that today could be the day that the company decides they’re all too much trouble and scrubs them off the list.   
  
Even if he could tell them, he doesn’t want to. It seems shameful, somehow, like they’re going to look at him and suddenly see the person that Jin does, now. He knows it is stupid. The other members have seen him at his absolute worst and haven’t turned on him. They’re all fucked up in their own ways, but they all protect each other, in the end.   
  
Koki broaches the subject when too many tabloid reports bank up and Jin becomes the bloated elephant in the room, sulking on the couch and eating up the atmosphere. Just like old times.   
  
“You’ve been hangin’ out with Akanishi?” he says. They’re being fitted for costumes for the tour, standing like scarecrows, glimmering rags hanging around their elbows and from their hips.   
  
Kame is too aware of the stylist kneeling at his feet; a dangerous variable. Koki should know better than to talk about this in front of her. Any talk about his relationship with Jin is highly classified and has been for years.   
  
He says, “Yeah.”  
  
He knows Koki wants to say, ‘why’. It is written all over his face, in the slight twitch of his moustached mouth. Instead, he says, “How is he?”  
  
Kame’s arms are tired. He rolls his neck, trying to ease the muscles into submission.  
  
“Fine,” he says, and they don’t talk about it again.   
  
—  
  
Jin usually talks to Nakamaru on the phone about once a month, but he’s been avoiding returning his calls ever since this whole Kame thing started. He’s worried Kame has told him all about what a douche he’s been and he doesn’t know if he can stand hearing the gentle disapproval in Nakamaru’s voice. That guy is always so patient with him, standing by even when Jin has given him every reason in the world not to.   
  
It was Nakamaru that tried to patch things up between them the first time, at least five years ago now. He’d called them both out for ramen and tried to negotiate a peace treaty. Jin can still remember the sight of him with his head buried in his hands as he’d pushed his own seat back and stormed out of the restaurant. Kame with his hands folded in his lap, unmoving.  
  
Nakamaru calls when Jin is just sitting around on his couch and can’t think of a single reason in the world not to answer. Slowly, reluctantly, feeling exhaustion sweep over him, Jin swipes the call open and says, “Yo.”  
  
It’s actually good to hear Nakamaru’s voice.   
  
They chat about football and KAT-TUN’s upcoming single, the problems Junno is having with his secret fiance, the new season of _True Blood_ , stovepipe jeans (Nakamaru's love and Jin's intense loathing), a mutual friend’s upcoming movie, and then, Nakamaru finally says, “Have you really patched things up with Kamenashi?”   
  
Jin scratches the side of his nose, closing his eyes. “Ah,” he says at length. “Yeah.”  
  
“I’m glad,” Nakamaru says. He sounds kind of emotional, which is just uncomfortable. “Seriously, I’m really glad.”  
  
Jin feels like an asshole.  
  
—  
  
By the time Kamenashi joins them at the karaoke place Jin’s been drinking sweet, girly cocktails with stupid names for hours and he’s feeling loud and obnoxious. He’d commandeered the mic for almost the first hour, starting with some Kanye and Lil Wayne but quickly devolving into Hello!Project’s back catalogue at his friend’s urging. When Kame gets there he’s run out of energy, croaky voiced and sprawled across the bench. Josh is desecrating a Rolling Stones classic.  
  
Jin doesn’t even say hello as Kame enters.  
  
Kame is quiet, tucked into a corner, flicking absently back and forth through the songbook. He doesn’t queue up any songs, which isn’t like him. When he and Jin used to come to karaoke together when they were kids they’d spend half the time fighting over the playlist and the rest sloppily singing over each other’s selections, relieved not to think about pitch or tone or any of those other boring things they were supposed to care about, as idols. Jin keeps waiting for Kame to grab the controls and line up ten boring old Beatles songs in a row, but he doesn’t. He just sits there with his chin in his fist, face blank as Kusano moves into the chorus of _My Sharona_.  
  
He’s probably turned down plans with a Texas oil baron and the princess of Bulgaria to be here, but Jin doesn’t care. No-one looks down their noses at Jin’s friends. So they’re not sitting around eating lobster and talking about the opera or their investment portfolios or whatever. Jin’s friends are simple and awesome and real, not like those posers Kamenashi hangs out with. He wants to lean across the table, jab Kame in the chest and tell him so.  
  
As if sensing Jin’s indignant stare, Kame turns and looks back at him, head tilted slightly, inquisitively. Jin scowls back at him. Kame rolls his eyes and finishes off the last of his beer.   
  
“Snob,” Jin says. He doesn’t know if Kame can hear him over Kusano’s wailing, but Ryo does. He elbows Jin in the side and says, “Take it easy, dillweed.”   
  
Ryo had Jin’s back for the first few weeks of this whole Kamenashi debacle, but lately his loyalty has been less and less convincing, disappearing completely the second he has a few drinks. A few weeks ago Jin found him leaning heavily on Kame’s shoulders, drunk and lumberingly affectionate, talking about how glad he was that they’re all friends. That fucking traitor. When Jin had tried to reach out and take Ryo off his hands, Kame had just wrapped his arm more securely around Ryo’s waist and said, “It’s ok, I’ve got him.”  
  
Jin orders another round of drinks just as Kusano is wrapping up his song. The first few notes of the next song send a little missile of aggravation through him and Jin looks around, wondering which one of these betrayers queued up _The_ fucking _D-Motion_. Kusano tries to hand Jin the mic, because Jin always sings this when they come to karaoke, but he can’t. Not this time, with Kame’s curious, bemused eyes on him. He shoves the mic away.   
  
“Why’d you put this on?” he asks. “I’m not contractually obligated to sing this shit anymore.”  
  
Kame’s mouth twists. Everyone goes quiet except for the tinny muzak pounding out through the sound system. They miss the first line of lyrics, and then the second, and then Kame begins to sing.   
  
For a few seconds, the words can barely be heard over the backing track, and then Kusano presses the mic into his hand and his voice blares to life, a bit thin and husky like he might be getting a cold.   
  
The song sounds lonely when only Kame is singing. Jin finds it hard not to join in; even at their worst, music was something that was always easy between them. All they have to do is close their eyes and let go and their voices will find a way to figure things out.   
  
It was actually Jin that chose this song. For KAT-TUN. They’d known already that he was going to leave and they’d all wanted something good, something really good, something to send him off with a bang. Jin just wanted something that would make everybody happy.   
  
Listening to Kame makes him feel queasy, but he tells himself he isn’t guilty. He just needs to take a piss.   
  
By the time he comes back from the bathroom, the song is over, and Kame is gone. Jin gets an email a few hours later.  
  
 _This is over,_ it says. _I’ll talk to Johnny._


	2. Part Two

Kame hates Johnny’s office. He loves the old man, but going into that office rarely ends well for him. Whenever they set up a meeting he kind of wants to invite Johnny out to Starbucks or something instead. If they’re in public, Johnny will try not to ruin his life. Probably. Maybe he’d just do it and pay off the tabloids later.  
  
When Kame tells him he wants to stop this whole charade with Jin, he’s not sure what to expect – not that you can ever really know what to expect where Johnny is concerned.   
  
The old man pulls his glasses off and swipes his hand over his face, grumbling, “That kid is being a pain, huh?”  
  
Kame’s leg jiggles. “It’s mutual,” he says. “We just rub each other up the wrong way.”   
  
“Yeah right,” Johnny says. “Don’t try to bullshit me, kid, I’ve known you both too long. I could ask you to get along with the devil and you’d do your best to try.” He sits back in his giant cinematic supervillain chair. He looks small and tired. “And that guy is far from the devil to you, right?”   
  
Kame squares his jaw. “We both tried,” he says. “It didn’t work out.”   
  
“Kazuya,” Johnny chides, and that’s when Kame breaks, scowling and slumping down in his chair. He knows he is pouting like a petulant child.  
  
“I tried, Johnny,” he whines. “He _hates_ me. He just _hates_ me.”   
  
He kind of wants Johnny to say something comforting about how he’s sure Jin doesn’t really hate him, deep down, but he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “He needs you.”   
  
“He sure doesn’t see it that way,” Kame says. He twists the thick rings on his fingers, the leather bracelets wrapped around his wrists.   
  
“He’s never been the brightest kid,” Johnny admits. He goes to the little bar fridge in the corner to get them some drinks. Any other company president would pour him a glass of scotch, but Johnny gets out a couple of cans of peach shandy. Kame could really do with something a bit harder. “I assume you’ve worked out why I asked you to do this.”   
  
“To get the tabloids to stop talking about how much we hate each other,” Kame says.   
  
Johnny nods, his funny little face bobbing. He smacks his lips as he drinks his shandy. Sometimes, Kame thinks that looking at Johnny is like looking at Pi about a hundred years from now. “And?”   
  
Kame slips his fingers beneath his bracelets and pulls them tight. “The other managers hate Jin,” he says finally.   
  
“Bingo!!!” Johnny says.  
  
“Johnny,” Kame sighs.   
  
“Let’s face it, kid,” Johnny says. “We both know you’re not gonna leave him to the wolves.”   
  
Kame feels as if he is the one that is being eaten alive.   
  
—  
  
Jin wakes to the feeling of somebody collapsing on the bed beside him, making the weight of his own body roll uncomfortably into the warm, foreign mass of the intruder. He cracks his eyes open and feels a giddy little thrill as he sees Pi’s profile. It’s been maybe two months since they last saw each other in person. Pi won’t come out and party when he’s got work the next day, which he pretty much always does.   
  
“Morning,” Jin mumbles, and lets his weight fall more naturally until his face is smushed up against Pi’s bicep.   
  
“It’s almost evening,” Pi says. He’s lying on his back staring up at Jin’s ceiling, wearing a pair of jeans and an ugly violet flannel shirt. “I’m skiving off work.”   
  
“For real?” Jin cracks one eye open. “Isn’t this one of the signs of the apocalypse?”  
  
Pi’s face is too serious, though, and he doesn’t respond quickly enough. Jin’s stomach clenches, suddenly aware of an oncoming doom.  
  
“Ryo-chan told me about what’s been going on with Kame,” he says finally, still with that serious, grandfatherly look on his face that Jin hates. He hates it when anyone lectures him, but he hates it most of all from Pi because it barely ever happens.   
  
“Well, you don’t have to worry about it anymore,” Jin says, rolling over onto his own back, away from the welcoming warmth of Pi’s body. “Kamenashi called uncle.”  
  
“Right, you made him so miserable he backed out of his professional responsibilities,” Pi says, all judgey. “Does that make you happy?”  
  
“Yes,” Jin says stubbornly.   
  
“As if,” Pi grumbles.   
  
“I hate that guy,” Jin insists.   
  
Pi snorts. “Seriously, as if.”   
  
“Fuck off,” Jin says, and rolls onto his side, facing away from Pi. He tries to pull the duvet over his head but Pi’s fat ass is pinning it to the bed and Jin ends up with the front of his body exposed and shivering. He curls his knees into his stomach and clutches the duvet futilely in one fist.   
  
“You fuck off,” Pi says. “What the fuck are you doing?”   
  
“He deserves it,” Jin mumbles into the pillow. He was so excited to see Pi before but now he just wants him to get up and go away and leave Jin alone for another two months or so.   
  
“What happened between you?” Pi asks. “Not now. Back then. What happened?”   
  
Jin closes his eyes against the nausea rising up his stomach and into his throat. He doesn’t answer until Pi pokes him in the back. Jin recoils and hisses, “I don’t know.” He smushes his face into his pillow, hating how weak and pathetic he sounds. “You know I don’t know.”  
  
Pi just lies beside him, breathing for a minute, and then he says, “Maybe it’s about time you found out.”   
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jin asks. He rolls over again, propping himself up on his elbows to glare at Pi. “Do you know something?”  
  
He does, he totally does, he can’t hide it from Jin now that the idea has occurred to him. His mouth is tight and unhappy and he says, “I just don’t want you to do anything you might regret,” but won’t tell Jin anything no matter how hard Jin presses.   
  
—  
  
Jin goes for a drive, drifting aimlessly out beyond the suburbs and towards the coast. He used to do this with Kame a lot, the pair of them smoking with the windows down, Kame’s bare feet on the dash. Back then the music they played was different, and they played it quietly so they could talk.   
  
He ends up at the quiet lookout they used to visit. He sits on the hood of his van and looks out at the light of the moon refracting from the troubled ocean, wrapping his arms tight around his knees and trying to make himself small.   
  
Back then, it had been sudden. One day they’d been talking about going on a trip overseas together, just the two of them. Jin wanted to go to LA and Kame wanted to go to London. Kame was winning, because Jin found it hard not to get swept up in the excitement lighting up Kame’s eyes. It’s painful to remember now, how much he’d loved that kid.   
  
The next day, Kame had gone incommunicado, disappearing almost totally from Jin’s universe for days, weeks at a time, only to reappear suddenly with detached, cryptic messages about how busy he was and how they’d catch up soon. At one point it got so they hadn’t seen or spoken to each other directly for four weeks, the longest they’d gone without communicating since they’d met as geeky little kids.   
  
Jin had tried everything to figure out what the fuck was going on. He asked Kame over and over. He asked everyone they knew. No-one seemed to know anything, but they’d told him to give it time, that Kame was probably just busy. This was business as usual, to them; Jin was always calling Kame and asking where he was, no big deal. They didn’t know that usually, Kame answered within hours no matter what. Sometimes, when he was super busy, he’d send Jin a message in response just giving his location and a time when he might be free. He always answered. Always. Until suddenly, he didn’t anymore.   
  
When they did see each other, usually at work, he waited for Kame to tell him what the problem was, to finally sit him down and open up about whatever it was he was hiding, and he was hiding something. Jin knew him better than anybody, they could tell him he was being psycho and paranoid all they wanted, nobody knew Kame like he did.   
  
All he wanted to know was what he’d done wrong.   
  
He never did find out. He’d showed up at Kame’s parents place drunk and practically in tears, and he still didn’t find out. And then, he’d just sort of given up. To him, it was like the kid he’d known – _his_ Kame – was dead and this impostor was walking around in his place, convincing everyone he was the same and only Jin knew he was gone. He’d been devastated, worse than any break up he’d ever had with any girl, worse than his first puppy dying, worse than anything. Losing Kame like that was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.  
  
Now Pi’s asking him to scratch those wounds open, to do it cruelly and knowingly, to tear open his flesh and let his blood ooze out for everyone to see. For Kame to see. And Jin doesn’t know if he can do it.   
  
He buries his face in his knees and thinks about Pi’s serious face, the lonely tremor of Kame’s voice singing D-Motion, Nakamaru saying, “I’m glad, I’m really glad,” and Kame at nineteen laughing and trying to lure Jin to London with the promise of clubbing with Kate Moss. He remembers Kame’s mother making him coffee to sober him up and letting him sleep on their couch, eyes wet as she told him Kame wasn’t even home.  
  
He can’t. He just seriously can’t.   
  
—  
  
Kame checks the mirror in Jin’s elevator as it slowly climbs floor by floor. There’s an orange splodge of foundation high up on his jaw, leftover from the appearance he’s just made on Music Station. He rubs it off irritably, then tries, feebly, to rub the glitter from around his eyes. It clings stubbornly to his cheekbones, sparkling when it hits the light. It’s all over his hair, too, because Ueda kept attacking him with little pinchfuls of the stuff out of boredom. He looks like living purikura.  
  
He feels nervous. Jin left a message on his voicemail a few hours earlier asking him to come over when he had a chance. Saying he’d be home all night. His voice had been strained tight as if he was forcing out the words against his will. It’s probably just that he’s realised it’s in his best interests to try and smooth things over after the other day, even though they both know he doesn’t want to. Still, though. Something in his voice made Kame’s stomach flip over with dread.  
  
Jin answers the door in a pair of jeans and a threadbare white t-shirt, looking as strangely anxious as Kame feels. He wordlessly stands aside to let Kame in. Kame’s never seen this apartment before; he looks around curiously as he enters. It’s neater than he would expect. Jin’s bedroom at his mother’s house used to look perpetually storm-ravaged, as if a cyclone had swept in and blown the contents of his closet all over the place. This place is cluttered in a sort of friendly, warm way that reminds Kame that he should finish unpacking the boxes at his own apartment if he wants it to look like a human being actually lives there.  
  
Jin hands him a beer and Kame says, “I talked to Johnny about calling this whole thing off, but he threatened to fire me if I did.” He sips his beer, unable to look at Jin. “I guess you’re stuck with me.”   
  
They’re standing on opposite sides of the room, about as far away from each other as they can possibly be. Jin’s leaning against a wall, beer bottle resting against his thigh. He grunts, the pinched look around his mouth intensifying. “That’s not what I wanted to talk about.”   
  
“Oh,” Kame says. He’s not sure why his brain starts helpfully pointing out the escape routes in this apartment, calculating the ease and difficulty of each. If he gets really desperate he could throw himself out the window behind him and just pray for a soft landing.   
  
Jin takes a breath so deep it’s almost gasping, drawing all his muscles up tight and then letting them go. “Pi said I should ask you what happened,” he says, eyes on his beer bottle rather than Kame’s face.   
  
The dread that has been crawling up Kame’s spine all night finally twists around his neck and pulls tight like a noose. “What happened, when?”   
  
Jin scowls. “You know when.”  
  
It’s true. He does know. “Isn’t that ancient history?”   
  
“Is it?” Jin asks. “I don’t know, you tell me.”   
  
Kame feels dizzy. He sits, heavily. “Jin,” he says, hearing an almost pleading note in his own voice that shames him. He’s worked hard to move beyond such weaknesses.  
  
“Tell me what Pi knows that I don’t,” Jin says stubbornly. He does look at Kame, finally, dark eyes hard and belligerent.   
  
“Pi knows lots of things you don’t,” Kame says, with an uneasy little laugh that he probably shouldn’t risk. Jin doesn’t smile.   
  
“This is your last chance,” Jin says. “This is the last time I’ll ever ask.”  
  
Kame closes his eyes and runs a shaky hand through his hair. His fingers come away glittery and he stares at them. “Are you sure?” he asks. “Once you know…” he swallows. “You might wish you didn’t.”  
  
Jin snorts. “How much worse can things between us get?” he asks. “It can’t be any worse than what I’ve been thinking, all this time.”   
  
“What’s that?” Kame asks, not sure if he wants to know.   
  
The silence stretches on so long that for a while Kame thinks Jin isn’t going to answer, until he does and Kame wishes he hadn’t, the answer makes him so miserable. “That you were using me, all that time,” he says. It sounds like he has as much trouble saying it as Kame has hearing it. “Then when you didn’t need me anymore, you ditched me.”   
  
“That’s…” Kame has to swallow against an embarrassing swell of tears. He pushes them down for later, when he’s alone. “How could you think that of me?”   
  
“What was I supposed to think?” Jin snaps. “I tried to think of another reason. Any reason. I’ve got nothing, Kame. You didn’t give me anything to go on. So just tell me already. It’s been five years. Just put me out of my fucking misery already.”   
  
Kame buries his face in his hands. “You’re about as far from the truth as you could possibly be,” he says miserably.   
  
There’s a muscle jumping in Jin’s jaw. “Tell me.”  
  
Kame scrubs his face and empties his beer bottle, slumping into the arm chair he’s sitting in. He wants to beg Jin not to make him do this, but the idea that this might really be his last chance, that if he doesn’t speak now he’ll forever have to hold his peace, that stops him. It was never meant to end up like this. Things were never meant to get so bad.   
  
He breathes for a minute, in, out, holding each breath for five seconds. His head is spinning.   
  
“It was the first time I was ever called into Johnny’s office at night,” he says when he can finally hear the sound of his own voice over the blood rushing in his ears. “It was a few months after we finished filming _Gokusen_ , maybe. I was totally freaking out, I thought some tabloid had caught me in a scandal, I don’t know. I was really scared.” He swallows, throat dry. “Can I have another beer?”   
  
Jin fetches one from the fridge and hands it to him in silence.   
  
“It wasn’t like that, though. He told me this story…” Kame swigs the beer. His heart is pounding, panicked. Everything in him is screaming to run. “About when he was a kid. How he was in love with his best friend and told him and ruined everything, because that guy could never love him back.” Jin’s face has gone slack, eyes wide. “How he didn’t want me to make the same mistake.”   
  
“No,” Jin says.  
  
“And I just,” Kame squeezes his eyes shut. “How did he know? I thought I’d been so careful.”   
  
“ _No,_ ” Jin says, more forcefully, but Kame can’t stop now. He’s come this far. If everything is fucked, he may as well make sure they both know why.  
  
“It wasn’t supposed to be permanent,” Kame says. “You weren’t supposed to notice.”  
  
“I noticed the first day,” Jin's voice cracks. “I probably noticed the first fucking hour. You went from mailing me eighty times a day to just… just nothing. You just fucking disappeared.”  
  
“I just needed some time by myself. To figure things out.” Kame’s voice is shaking. “I thought it would be like every other time we fought. I’d come to you and apologise and everything would go back to normal, we’d be best friends again and I wouldn’t have to lose you.” Tears are starting to swell his eyes until they feel like they’re going to explode. “But then… Shuuji to Akira was announced, and you were so angry, you wouldn’t even talk to me, and I didn’t know how to fix things. I wanted to, but I just didn’t know how.” He chokes. “I fucked up,” he says. “I’m sorry, I really fucked up.”  
  
“I need a minute,” Jin says, and sinks into a crouch, head in his hands. “I need a minute.”  
  
—   
  
Jin waits for Pi for hours. He lets himself in with the key that is supposed to be just for emergencies. At first, he just sits in the living room in the dark, brooding and expecting Pi to get home at any moment, but when twenty minutes pass he gives in and turns the lights on, and after an hour he gets hungry and angrily decides to raid Pi’s pantry. When Pi finally does get home, he finds Jin scowling and devouring a mountainous pile of sandwiches on the couch. Jin has been stuffing his face for two hours. Pi stops just inside the door and Jin shoves half a sandwich in his mouth. He stares at Pi murderously.   
  
Pi sighs and drops his bag on the floor, headed for the kitchen. “Just let me get a beer, it’s been a long day.”  
  
Jin talks around the huge lump of chewed up bread and peanut butter in his mouth. “You’ve had a long day,” he repeats. He swallows. “ _You’ve_ had a fucking long day.” He shoves another sandwich half in his mouth.   
  
Pi comes back with a beer and tries to take one of the half dozen sandwiches piled up on the plate. Jin slaps his hand away and hunches over the food like a prison inmate.  
  
“Are you trying to eat yourself into a coma?” Pi asks.  
  
Jin sniffs and tears a bite out of a cheese and mustard sandwich. “I can if I want,” he says insolently.  
  
“You know, white bread is basically just fluffy sugar,” Pi tells him.   
  
“Fuck off,” Jin hisses, but his stomach starts to lurch, finally catching up to his mouth, and he can barely finish his mouthful. He waves the sandwich half in the air threateningly, then throws it at Pi when it looks like Pi is about to start laughing at him. This is serious. It hits Pi in the shoulder then falls to the floorboards, where they both stare at it.  
  
“What the fuck, Pi?” Jin croaks after a minute. He needs to puke and for a minute he sincerely considers calmly walking into Pi’s bedroom and blowing chunks all over his pillow. Filthy traitors get what they deserve. “Seriously, what the fuck?”  
  
Pi scowls, bending down to pick up Jin’s half-eaten sandwich from the floor, then the overflowing plate of sandwiches on the coffee table. He disappears into the kitchen with them, then comes back with a bottle of water and some Alka Seltzer. He puts them calmly on the table in front of Jin. Jin wants to hit him and scream.   
  
When Pi sits next to Jin on the couch and wraps his arm around him, Jin tries to elbow him in the ribs to get him off, but Pi just ignores him and rests his big hand over Jin’s head, in Jin’s hair like he’s a stupid little kid.   
  
“How did you even know?” Jin asks, when Pi has held him prisoner for a minute. It’s unfathomable that Pi knows this thing about Kame, this huge thing, that Jin himself has somehow always managed to miss. “Since when does Kame spill his secrets to you?”   
  
When they were kids, the three of them were always friends, but it was always more like Pi was friends with Jin and Kame was friends with Jin, and Jin not-so-secretly liked it that way. The idea of them having secrets that they keep from him is infuriating, even now. That’s not how this works, he wants to remind them. They’re breaking the rules.  
  
Pi tells Jin about the fight he had with Kame in the park, which Jin already knew about. A month after Kame started being weird, maybe, Pi lost his shit and demanded an explanation from Kame. Kame screamed at him to mind his own goddamned business and they both ended up coming into work the next day covered in bruises. Jin remembers staring at the finger-shaped bruises in Pi’s forearm and feeling bewildered; Kame did that? The Kame he knew didn’t really get into brawls; even when Ueda punched him that time he’d spent more time running his mouth than fighting back. It’s hard to imagine what could get him worked up to the point that he’d get into it with Pi of all people.  
  
Jin supposes he understands, now.  
  
“I know all this,” Jin snaps, finally wrestling his way out from Pi’s arm and throwing himself on the other end of the couch. “Get to the part where you conspired to lie to me for five years.”   
  
It was a few weeks into the production of _Nobuta_ , Pi tells him. He’d remained furious with Kame all this time, refusing to talk to him off camera, making snippy, passive aggressive comments when Kame did try to make conversation. Pi thought they were circling each other like angry wolves, but then…  
  
“I don’t know, I realised it’s more like I was an angry wolf and he was a mangled rabbit that someone mauled and left for dead,” Pi says. “We weren’t fighting so much as he was on the ground and I was kicking him over and over.”   
  
He lights a cigarette. Pi never smokes inside. “So one day I kicked too hard and he burst. I can’t remember what it was that set him off. We’d been on set for like 30 hours and I’m pretty sure he hadn’t slept properly for at least 40. And I said something snide and next thing I know I’m locked outside our dressing room while he sobs, but he’s trying to insist he’s not crying, even though it sounds like a Spanish telenovela in there.”   
  
Jin reaches out and takes Pi’s cigarette and draws on it, hard.  
  
“And you know, Kamenashi isn’t really a crybaby. It freaked me out. So I broke in and barricaded us in until he told me everything,” Pi says.   
  
“You should have told me,” Jin says. “You should have.”  
  
Pi takes the cigarette back. “I thought the stress might kill him.” At Jin’s snort, Pi insists, “I’m serious. The guy looked like he’d just tunnelled his way out of Auschwitz, it was disturbing. Some days he’d pass out on set and I wasn’t sure he’d wake up.”  
  
“Stop it,” Jin says, because he remembers that too; the sight of Kame disappearing before his very eyes; slender body swerving sickeningly into emaciation.  
  
“You could have told me later,” Jin says. “It’s been years since then. Years.”   
  
“I thought about it,” Pi admits. “When he got a bit better. But then you went to LA and when you came back it seemed like things were better between you… and he said that he didn’t feel that way anymore anyway.” He sighs. “I just didn’t see the point.”  
  
Things were better after Jin got back from LA, but they were a long way from being back to normal. Jin had gone to LA determined to leave his entire life behind; when he first left he was not at all sure he would ever be back. He’d spent the time working on this great new life. He’d met Josh and a bunch of his friends. He’d met girls and taken drugs and experienced what it was like to be a normal guy. Somewhat.   
  
He’d called Kame a couple of times while he was over there, drunkenly, because even though he was having an awesome time, he still got lonely sometimes. He still got homesick. Even after everything, when he closed his eyes and thought of home, his thoughts inevitably drifted to Kame’s face.  
  
It had been a bit easier, after he got back, to get along. When they’d first seen each other Kame had told him he was glad that he was home, and somehow, Jin had believed him. They’d remained sort of politely friendly ever since, remaining in each other’s orbit but never drawing closer until Johnny had crushed them together with his frail old man’s fists. In close proximity, it hadn’t taken Jin long to lose his composure.   
  
He wonders what would have happened, if Pi had told him years ago.  
  
—  
  
Kame remembers the first time he saw Jin, outside the audition with his button up Adidas sweatpants, numberplate taped to his chest in a way that seemed triumphant when everyone else’s just seemed sad. He’d been arguing with his mother about the best way to do his hair; from a distance, it seemed like he wanted to spike it up a bit in front while she kept reaching out and fondly brushing it flat. He’d had a dorky, unbalanced smile that made the world go kind of wobbly.  
  
It’s the closest Kame has ever come to experiencing love at first sight. That’s not how he thought of it at the time, though; he’d felt wistful, kind of, as he reached down to try and tug his own zippered sweatpants over his ankles and muss up his hair so that people wouldn’t know his mother had made him part it on the side and comb it in the car on the way over. Jin had looked like the kind of boy for whom things came easy. This whole mess of chaos around him, shrieking mothers and sullen looking boys, and none of it seemed to phase him.   
  
Jin was the only boy at the audition who admitted he was there just because he wanted to be. After everyone had grown up, some had admitted to Kame that they’d lied when they said relatives or classmates had signed them up, they just hadn’t known at the time how to admit that they thought they were good enough to be Johnny’s. That they thought they were special.   
  
Kame himself had genuinely been more or less sold out by his parents, stumbling into this life in the same way he stumbles into everything; pushed by external forces. For Kame, life has always been about making the best of whatever is thrown at him. Being thrown in the water and teaching himself how to swim.  
  
Jin’s always doing divebombs off the high dive; half the time he’s spluttering and drowning, but he never stops jumping.  
  
Kame stills remembers the first thing Jin ever said to him, too. They’d been split into small groups after a dance routine, and they were waiting on plastic folding chairs outside what Kame now knows as the junior’s locker room. Jin leaned around the kid that was sitting between them – he’d been unsuccessful, and Kame doesn’t remember his name, just that Jin had made fun of it – and said, “Hey.”  
  
“Hi,” Kame replied.   
  
“Do you have any money?” Jin asked.   
  
“Eh?” Kame blinks.   
  
Jin just stares back at him and then says, after a long moment, “Well?”  
  
Almost instinctively, Kame unzipped his pocket and scratched around inside, dropping a small collection of coins in Jin’s hand a few minutes later. There was maybe ¥350 in different denominations. Jin nodded seriously and disappeared. He came back a few minutes later with an Iced Tea for himself and a grape Fanta for Kame; Kame hated grape Fanta, but he accepted it anyway, bemused. Years into the future, whenever Jin thought Kame was upset with him he’d go and buy him a grape Fanta, as if this was the accepted currency of forgiveness between them. Kame would take it every time, actually feeling grateful for this reminder that Jin had chosen him. Out of everybody, on that day, he’d looked around the room and decided that Kame was the guy for him.  
  
Now, at 25 years of age, Kame lies on his back in bed and stares up at the projection of the moon on his ceiling, counting the glistening stars around its perimeter and wishing that Jin would show up on his doorstep with a bottle of Fanta and a sheepish grin.   
  
After his confession, Jin had crouched there on his floor, head in his hands, for so long that Kame had thought he’d fallen into a catatonic coma. Then he’d got up and stormed out the front door without even putting his jacket or his outside shoes on. He’d left Kame sitting there in his apartment alone so long that Kame had eventually given up and come home.   
  
He closes his eyes and remembers the kid with the unbalanced grin. He wonders, if he could do everything over, if he’d take the nameless kid’s money instead.  
  
—  
  
Jin is aware that he is going to have to talk to Kame again some day, but he puts it off for days. He’s not trying to be cruel, though he knows he is. He just honestly does not know what he should say. Where to go from here. Where this leaves them.  
  
He goes out with his friends. His reliable, uncomplicated friends who have (mostly) never been in love with him. Who have never taken his heart and ripped it out of his chest because they were too shitscared to _tell_ him they were in love with him. He sits in the VIP and drinks while they dance.  
  
After a few hours Peter comes and sits next to him. He nudges Jin with his shoulder and says, “What crawled up your ass and died?”  
  
Jin pours himself another glass of Dom Perignon, trying to get in the mood for a party. The more he drinks, though, the more confused he feels. The more he feels as if he should be able to grasp answers that are just out of reach.   
  
“Have you ever been in love with a straight guy?” he asks Peter after a while.   
  
Peter just raises his eyebrows and takes Jin’s champagne glass. “If this is your way of asking if I’m in love with you–“   
  
“Fuck off,” Jin whines. “Why can’t anyone just answer a simple question?”  
  
“What kind of straight guy?” Peter asks.   
  
Jin drinks the champagne from the bottle. “A friend,” he says.   
  
Peter grunts; Jin isn’t sure if it’s in assent or just acknowledgement.   
  
“Would you tell him?” Jin asks. “If you were in love with your friend?”  
  
It’s weird having this conversation when they practically have to yell to be heard, but somehow it makes Jin feel less vulnerable.   
  
“We’re talking about Kamenashi, right?” Peter asks slyly.  
  
“No,” Jin snaps, then, “Why would you think that?”  
  
Peter snickers. “I was this close to talking him into bed the other day,” he says, holding up two fingers millimetres apart. “I’m guessing you don’t have that many gay ex best friends.”   
  
Jin grits his jaw and refuses to confirm or deny the statement.   
  
“Thought so,” Peter says. They sit in silence for a while, drinking their champagne, and then Peter says, “I might not tell him. If it was my best friend.”   
  
“Why not?” Jin asks.  
  
Peter grimaces. “What’s the point of losing my best friend in the name of feelings that can’t _ever_ be requited?”   
  
“But how do you _know_ they won’t?” Jin is frustrated with himself; he’s not a child, he knows how.  
  
“Because that’s just _life_ , dumbass.” He pours Jin another glass of champagne and then disappears with the bottle, leaving Jin to mope in peace.  
  
—   
  
“I wouldn’t have been a dick about it,” Jin says, the second Kame answers the phone. Kame’s quiet for a second and Jin wonders where he is; it’s late and there’s absolutely no sound in the background. Maybe he’s at home in bed. “If you’d told me. Back then.”  
  
“I know,” Kame says after a minute. “It wasn’t about that.”  
  
“Oh,” Jin says. He’s sitting cross legged on the floor in his en suite bathroom so that the friends who are sleeping in every room of his apartment don’t hear him. His voice bounces around the walls.  
  
“I knew you loved me,” Kame says. “Maybe not the way I wanted you to, but…” The sound of rustling, as if he’s pulling his blankets over his head. “I thought it would hurt you to know how much you were hurting me.”   
  
He’s right, it does hurt. If Jin stops to think about how lonely and scared he must have been he’s overcome with nausea, so he doesn’t. Can’t.   
  
“You think my best friend not contacting me for weeks at a time didn’t hurt?” Jin says instead.   
  
“It wasn’t weeks!” Kame exclaims.   
  
“Yes it was,” Jin says stubbornly. He should know, he was the one waiting by the phone like a homely character in a 1950s American sitcom.   
  
“It was not,” Kame says. “I had very strict rules about how often I was allowed to contact you.”   
  
“What,” Jin chokes, because that sounds pretty crazy.  
  
If the scratchy high note in his voice is any indication, Kame is pretty embarrassed. “Every 65 hours,” he says. “More if I had genuine concerns about your welfare.”   
  
“Every 65 hours,” Jin repeats.   
  
“Yes,” Kame says firmly. Then, “Until you changed your phone number.”  
  
Oh, Jin thinks. Oh. He remembers that, now. The satisfaction he’d felt, imagining Kame standing there listening to the robotic lady telling him that the call could not be connected.   
  
He winces. “Oh,” he says. “Oh, yeah.”   
  
“Yeah,” Kame says.  
  
It really had felt like weeks.   
  
“Kame,” Jin whines. “I’m _NEEDY_. You _KNOW_ that.”  
  
“Jin,” Kame says miserably.   
  
“How did you know I wouldn’t love you back?” Jin asks. “You didn’t even try.”  
  
Kame is silent for a long time, then he says, “Was I wrong?”  
  
Jin swallows.   
  
“If I came to you and told you I loved you,” Kame’s voice shakes a bit on the words, sounds too heavy and too full, “Would you have swept me off my feet? Would we have lived happily after?”   
  
Jin’s breath hitches as he tries to force himself to answer. “No,” he says, after forever.  
  
“I didn’t think so,” Kame exhales. Jin listens to his breath. “I just wanted to find a way to keep my best friend. That’s all I wanted.”   
  
“Great job you did of it,” Jin snaps, snide. He stares at himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink. He looks too old to be having tortured phone conversations while trapped in his own bathroom.   
  
“I did my best.” Kame sighs. He sounds so tired. “I don’t know what to say. I did my best.”  
  
“I know,” Jin says. He closes his eyes and lets his head fall back against the towels that hang from the rail behind him. “I’m sorry.”   
  
They sit in silence for a while and then Jin thinks, _Be a man, Akanishi_ , and says, “I’d like us to try to be friends again.”   
  
Kame sniffs and then he says, “I’d like that.”


	3. Part Three

The next time they see each other, Jin brings Kame a 1.5 litre bottle of Grape Fanta. He puts it on the kitchen bench next to the stack of DVDs that he also brought along, and they both stare at it, smile tugging the corners of Kame’s mouth.   
  
“Drink it,” Jin says after a minute.   
  
Kame laughs. “I actually hate Grape Fanta,” he confesses, sheepishly.  
  
Jin stares at him. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?” he asks.  
  
“Because I’m sentimental,” Kame says.   
  
“We could have changed the tradition to melon soda or something,” Jin points out. He cracks the seal on the bottle and pours it into a tall glass, which he nudges towards Kame. “Drink it anyway.”   
  
Kame screws up his nose as he reluctantly picks up the glass. The liquid is violently purple and still bubbling like a witch’s brew. He takes a sip and nearly gags; it’s been years since he subjected himself to this. “It’s vile,” he says.   
  
“Drink it all,” Jin demands.   
  
“Fine,” Kame says, retrieving a second glass from the dish rack to pour Jin a serve. “You, too.”   
  
“Fine,” Jin says, and takes a huge, brave gulp. His face crumples the second the liquid hits his tongue, but he swallows. “That’s really disgusting,” he says. “Really, disgusting.”   
  
Kame smiles over the rim of his glass. “You get used to it,” he says. “After the sugar burns away all your tastebuds.”   
  
“Next time I really will get melon soda,” Jin promises. He takes another gulp of the soda as if in solidarity.   
  
“No,” Kame says. “It has to be Grape Fanta.” He snickers. “It reminds me to try not to fight with you.”   
  
Jin falls silent, and Kame feels a bit awkward. They agreed to meet in private this time, where they could keep their still raw wounds to themselves, away from the prying eyes of strangers or even friends. He wonders if it’s even possible for them to go back to the way things were.  
  
No matter what, anything is better than the way things are. Or, he supposes, the way things have been. He can feel the slight change already, tentative and timid, but hopeful.   
  
Jin picks up his stack of DVDs and wanders over to the TV, kneeling and carefully laying them out season by season. He’s forcing Kame to watch season three of _Lost_. Kame watched the first season and a half when it first started before getting fed up with the convoluted plot and stupid cliffhangers, all polar bears and no real answers. It had been a source of contention between them over the years, because Jin had stuck by the stupid show with his characteristic stubborn loyalty, swearing that it was getting better and better.   
  
“Oh,” Jin says, just as Kame comes over with a couple of bottles of beer and a bowl of Cheese Supreme Doritos that he’d picked up from the American supermarket a few districts over while gripped by a fit of anxiety about this meeting. His fridge is full of food Jin might like, as if they have a week long visit planned and not just an afternoon in front of the TV.   
  
“Oh?” Kame repeats.   
  
Jin is staring down at the DVDs, biting his lip sheepishly. “They’re American DVDs,” he says. “They don’t have subtitles.” They both stare at the row of discs in front of them, and Jin offers, “We could watch something else?”  
  
“I could probably follow it ok…” Kame says, even though this is an outrageous lie. He could barely follow the show’s stupid plot when it was dubbed into Japanese, let alone if everyone is talking in English.   
  
“If you’re sure…” Jin slides a disc into the player and crawls over to the couch, curling up in the corner with his knees crossed at his chest, feet overhanging the ledge of the cushion. Kame slumps at the other end, resting his beer on his knee.   
  
One episode in, it’s clear to Kame that this is going to be a long night, because he has no idea what the hell is going on. Jack is being interrogated by some woman Kame has never seen before, and Kate and Sawyer are in cages but Kame doesn’t know why. Then there are long, boring flashbacks and Jack spends a lot of time looking tense and yelling at some good looking old guy.   
  
Jin keeps glancing at him sidelong, and Kame knows his boredom is showing. As the second episode starts, Jin starts translating it for him, trying and failing to squeeze his explanations into the spaces between the dialogue on screen. It’s easier to figure out what is going on, now, but Kame finds he doesn’t care any more than he did before; it’s more fun to sit there and listen to Jin than it is to watch the DVD.  
  
After a while, Kame realises Jin has given up on accurately translating the action and he’s just started making stuff up, doing funny voices for the characters. Jack becomes a gravel-voiced Yakuza and Sayid seems to have picked up a lazy Osaka inflection, and they don’t talk about the Island or the Others but about how Kate is a babe and Jack is lame.   
  
Kame joins in, pitching his voice high to fill in Sun’s dialogue. They skew wildly off track; according to their translation, most of the episode becomes about Nakamaru’s hair and the hunt for a better wig. This is hilarious enough to get them through three episodes, Kame slumping more and more into the couch. Jin keeps crunching his way through the Doritos. His lips and fingertips are unnaturally orange.   
  
When they can’t bring themselves to sit through another episode, Jin channel surfs. They watch five minutes of an episode of some shoujo anime Kame doesn’t recognise, two minutes of an old Sly Stallone movie, ten minutes of Matsumoto Jun’s new drama, most of which is taken up by Jin mocking his clothes and his hair, about thirty seconds of a news report about the effects of global warming on islands in the Pacific, and then about forty minutes of MTV. The urban charts are playing and Jin is horrified that Kame hasn’t heard of about three quarters of the songs. He keeps looking at him hopefully as new songs come on, saying, “You know this one, right,” then, “HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW THIS?” when Kame just stares back at him blankly.   
  
“I don’t have a lot of time to sit around watching MTV,” Kame says irritably. It’s almost 2am and the coffee table is littered with beer bottles and dirty dishes piled up from dinner.   
  
“You sound like my dad,” Jin says. “What do you listen to, then?”  
  
Kame rests his cheek on the couch. He mostly listens to stuff that friends give him, but it’s all kinds of stuff. Beyonce and Death Cab for Cutie and The Temper Trap, Usher and Big Bang and Phoenix. Lady Gaga. Justin Bieber. Mr Children. SNSD. The Beatles. The Carpenters. Kobukuro. Kanye West.   
  
“Stuff,” he says. The song on the TV ends and a new one begins, Jin’s own face filling the screen along with the screech of violins. Gold, gold, gold, yellow gold, gold, gold. Kame smiles crookedly. “I bought this CD.”  
  
Jin is peering at the screen, slightly red-faced. He looks at Kame, perhaps slightly warily. “Yeah?”  
  
“I pre-ordered it online,” Kame says. “Limited edition.” He elbows Jin. “Maybe you could sign it for me.”   
  
Jin’s slightly red face explodes into a full-on blush and he blurts, “You never came to any of the shows.” He scratches his nose. “Everyone else came. Except Ueda.”  
  
Kame stares at him, a bit taken aback. He’d considered it, of course, but he’d never really thought… “Everyone else was invited,” he says.  
  
“I didn’t want to invite you,” Jin mumbles, “but I thought you might come.”   
  
On screen, Jin bobs around in his yellow hoodie. Kame says, “I didn’t think you wanted me to.”   
  
“I didn’t either,” Jin says, “… but maybe I did.”  
  
Kame slumps on the couch. He can’t apologise, but he says, “Okay.”   
  
They lapse into quietness again, and Jin switches the channel to Animal Planet, which is mercifully showing a documentary about baby tigers, all fuzzy and orange and uncontroversial. They both moan over how cute they are for a while, and then Jin yawns and looks at all the beers.   
  
“Is it ok if I crash here?” he asks, scratching behind his ear. “I’ve had too much to drink.”   
  
Once upon a time he wouldn’t have asked, he’d have just gotten up and stumbled into Kame’s room and passed out on his bed, hogging all the blankets and pillows so Kame had to burrow close to him for warmth. Kame wonders if they’ll ever get to that point, rather than this careful awkwardness, circling each other at arm’s length.  
  
“Yeah,” Kame says. “There’s a spare room.”  
  
He finds Jin some clean towels and a toothbrush. Jin picks the toothbrush up from the top of the pile and stares at it. It’s a Pocket Doltz, one of a box of fifty that the company had sent over to him not long after the ad was released. He’d given away a dozen, maybe, and the rest have just been sitting there. He’d been tempted to give Jin a pale pink one, but he’d settled on gold.   
  
“This is a really fancy hotel,” Jin says, still staring at the toothbrush. “Are there mints on my pillows, too?”   
  
“Shut up,” Kame says. “Goodnight.”   
  
He turns to leave, and Jin says, “Hey,” so he pauses in the doorway.   
  
“This was fun,” Jin says, standing there awkwardly in his thin white t-shirt and boxers, clutching his toothbrush and his towels.   
  
“Yeah,” Kame says.   
  
“Goodnight,” Jin says, and Kame slips out of the room and goes to bed.  
  
—  
  
Jin isn’t entirely sure how to bring up the subject with Josh, who had never really known a time when Jin considered Kame anything but an uptight, shallow loser he was forced to work with. Josh is peripherally aware that they used to be tight, but Jin has gone out of his way to avoid filling in the details and Josh never seemed that interested anyway.  
  
It’s weird, now, to sit across from him and say, “I want you to try and get on with Kamenashi.”   
  
Josh blinks. “I thought he was like your sworn nemesis or something,” he says, sipping his mocha frappe through a straw.   
  
Jin makes a sheepish face and pushes his fries around on his plate. “I might have misread the situation.”   
  
Josh starts to laugh. “Why do I think that’s like a total understatement?” he asks wryly. Jin makes a face and throws a fry at him. “Whatever, man,” Josh says. “You know I got your back no matter what.”   
  
Jin grunts and bumps his fist against Josh’s, then shoves a handful of fries in his mouth all at once, chewing with his mouth open because it grosses Josh out.   
  
“So what happened?” Josh asks, when Jin’s swallowed his disgusting mouthful of food.  
  
Jin shrugs, unsure how to answer without betraying Kame in the process. Peter might have thought it was obvious, but Jin’s pretty sure Kame would freak out if Jin just went around blurting out his secrets all over the place. Jin has kept some of Kame’s secrets since they were kids, never sharing them even at the height of his own animosity. He’s not about to start blurting them out now.   
  
“It was just a misunderstanding,” Jin says. “A really stupid misunderstanding.”  
  
Josh’s eyebrows lift, but he says, “Ok, it’s a secret.” He steals one of Jin’s fries. “I’ll do my best, but I dunno, I probably didn’t make the greatest first impression.”  
  
Jin shoves the plate away, stuffed. “He’ll try,” he says. “He always tries.”  
  
—  
  
A few days after Jin crashed in the guest room at Kame’s house – in a bed that had soft, warm sheets that smelled like lavender – he gets an email at 5am with a photo of Kame’s manager fast asleep on the train, mouth hanging wide open and glasses askew.   
  
_5AM and I’m on the shink already,_ Kame says. _I want to go back to bed._  
  
 _i just got in bed,_ Jin types. It is Sunday morning. _sucker!!!_  
  
 _Motherfucker!_ , Kame replies in English, which surprises Jin into a bark of laughter that makes Kusano grumble and shift on the other side of the bed. Jin can’t remember the last time he slept in his bed alone.  
  
 _i know u r but what am i?_ Jin says, rolling onto his side, away from Kusano.   
  
_A motherfucker,_ Kame says. Jin imagines him sitting in his reserved seat on the shinkansen, hair morning-messy and eyes hidden by sunglasses.   
  
_u r the motherfucker,_ Jin counters.   
  
_No,_ Kame says.  
  
 _YES,_ Jin says.  
  
 _I don’t do pussy,_ Kame says, and then, less than twenty seconds later, when Jin is still laughing, _Typing that really grossed me out._  
  
 _LOL LOL LOL,_ Jin types. _LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL!_  
  
 _I woke manager up laughing,_ Kame says. _He’s grumpy._  
  
 _that guy is always grumpy,_ Jin says. _he needs to get laid._  
  
 _GROSS,_ Kame says. _GROSS, GROSS, GROSS._  
  
 _mb u could offer him sexual favours,_ Jin says.  
  
 _You’re disgusting,_ Kame says.   
  
_but he wants u,_ Jin is trying to muffle his laughter in his pillow, but Kusano gets up and grabs a pillow, giving him a dirty look and stomping out of the room, probably to crash in the other room with Josh and Ken.   
  
_Gross._   
  
_he is hot for kamenashi,_ Jin says. _wants ur hot body._   
  
_Stop,_ Kame says.   
  
_he wants to plow ur juicy boyhole,_ Jin types.   
  
Nothing for a minute, and then, _Maybe he wants me to plow his._   
  
Jin screws up his nose. _that is disgusting, Kame._  
  
 _I can taste his sweet lovejuice,_ Kame says.   
  
_STOP BEING DISGUSTING,_ Jin says.   
  
_I’m going to take him for a ride on the Kamenashi Express._   
  
Jin just stares down at the phone, feeling prudish, now, even though he knows Kame is just totally unwilling to lose whatever stupid game they’re playing. He feels backed into a corner, because he can’t help picturing Kame sleeping with that gross old man but he doesn’t want to lose either. He tries to think of something he can say, but just as he’s about to give up, Kame mails again.  
  
 _That’s as far as I can take it,_ he says.   
  
_i think u secretly want him,_ Jin replies, back on solid ground.  
  
 _I wouldn’t sleep with that guy if you paid me a billion dollars,_ Kame says. _He smells like cauliflower._  
  
 _poor guy,_ Jin says. He rolls into the bed, stretching out. He’s starting to get really tired.  
  
 _I think his taste runs more towards trashy girls,_ Kame says. _Like yours._  
  
 _fuck off!_ Jin says. _im into sophisticated n intelligent women._  
  
 _Ok,_ Kame types, condescension dripping from those two letters.   
  
_i am!_ Jin insists.   
  
_I’ll remind you of this next time I see you doing body shots off a swimsuit model,_ Kame says. Jin only has a vague memory of the last time he did bodyshots off anyone, but it could have been any one of the times he made Kame come out to a club with his friends and then ignored him all night. He wonders if Kame felt jealous, or if all that was over.   
  
_dont discriminate against swimsuit models,_ Jin says. _she mighta been a swimsuit model + a lawyer._   
  
_Uh huh,_ Kame says, clearly unconvinced.   
  
Jin feels sluggish and sleepy, but he still manages to type, _or a doctor. swimsuit-sensei._   
  
_Your ideal woman,_ Kame says, then a second later, _Gotta go._  
  
 _mail me later,_ Jin says, and then falls asleep.   
  
—  
  
Jin had thought, when they agreed to try to be friends again, that they would eventually have to accept that things could never be how they were and settle into whatever scraps were left over after the complete demolition of their relationship. It only takes a couple of days of exchanging emails for him to realise that things probably _could_ be how they were, given a little time, and that’s a bit terrifying.   
  
Jin is someone who takes friendship extremely seriously, so he is not altogether surprised to realise that he has apparently missed Kame all this time; that some pitiful little voice inside has been pining for years, emitting such a low and constant whine that he hadn’t even noticed it until it came to an abrupt stop.   
  
His mother notices right away. He goes to his parent’s place for dinner and he’s only been sitting on the couch playing with the dogs for a few minutes when she says, “Did something good happen?”   
  
He doesn’t know why he feels shy, but his cheeks go a bit pink as he says, “Why?”  
  
“You’re in a good mood,” she says.   
  
“Am I?” Jin asks. He scratches his nose and then picks up the squeaky thing, squeezing it to make the dogs go mental. Diversion is key.   
  
“Did you meet a girl?” she asks, undeterred. That’s enough to sour his mood a bit; he’s gone off Kelly altogether because she keeps asking him about when Kame is coming back to the club, and so far nobody has stepped in to fill her place. Jin likes being in love. It’s a bit sad to be left without any prospects at all.   
  
“No,” he says.   
  
Then she says, “Have you really been hanging out with Kazuya?” and Jin squirms.  
  
“A bit,” he says, playing it cool, trying to ignore the stupid sappy look on his mother’s face; she’s smiling so wide he can barely see her eyes, but he’s pretty sure they’re a bit misty. “It’s not a big deal.”  
  
It is a big deal.   
  
“Right,” she says.   
  
“It’s not,” he insists.   
  
“I know!” she replies, but she’s still got that look on her face that makes him want to puke.   
  
“You’re making it weird,” he complains, picking up Pin and burying his face in his fur. The dog keeps trying to turn around and lick Jin’s face, but he can’t reach so he settles for licking Jin’s sleeve instead.   
  
“Bring him over soon,” she says, “It has been such a long time.”   
  
“Yeah, yeah,” Jin promises, reluctantly, and is relieved when she heads back into the kitchen and leaves him alone.  
  
—  
  
Kame has been in Fukuoka for three days, hanging out with the Softbank Hawks as they prepare for a tough game against the Carps. The producers are looking for a kind of day-in-the-life, behind-the-scenes vibe, so all Kame really has to do most of the time is sit around and chat to the players in their down time. This leaves him with nothing to do most of the time, and he finds himself spending most of it emailing Jin. Jin keeps sending him stupid photos of his friends and his food, the sort of mundane messages you send when you’re really just trying to keep in touch. It’s easier, somehow, to communicate like this; when they don’t have to see each other face to face.  
  
He’d always thought that if they really tried to fix things between them, they’d find they were now so different that they couldn’t really make it work. The kids they had been might have been the perfect combination, but that now, as adults, they would surely struggle to find common ground. Maybe the best they’d ever be able to do would be to look back together with the shared warmth of nostalgia.   
  
Reading Jin’s stupid emails, though, Kame starts to have hope that maybe underneath all the differences, beneath their strange adult faces, they’re still the same people underneath. They are rearranging themselves to click into place, the perfect fit.   
  
For Kame, who honestly thought he might die from the wounds that were inflicted the last time they were torn apart – wounds that were self-inflicted, but gaping wide open and gushing blood anyway – the prospect is terrifying, and he wonders, sometimes, if he is unwise to put himself in this position again.  
  
Then Jin emails him just to tell him that the curry he is eating is delicious, and Kame thinks, _fuck it,_ and sends back a picture of his burger in reply.   
  
—  
  
Jin surprises himself by offering to pick Kame up at the station when he gets back into town. It’s not even like Jin didn’t have anything to do – he actually had to cancel plans with Jimmy to do it, and he hasn’t seen that guy in like five months. It’s not like Kame didn’t already have a ride, either. Jin assumes that his manager was going to arrange a driver anyway. Could still arrange a driver, if Jin were to call and cancel.  
  
He doesn’t. He actually shows up _early_ and has to drive around the block a few times, joining the steady stream of taxis pulling out of the station. Eventually he gets a message from Kame letting him know he’s just stepped off the train and he pulls around to the gate where they had agreed to meet, parking illegally by the curb. A young employee comes over to furiously try and wave him on, but when he rolls down the window and asks her to just let him stay for a moment, her cheeks flush pink and she stutters her agreement, bowing. Jin supposes the news will be out within hours; _Akanishi chaffeurs Kamenashi around Tokyo_.   
  
A second later, Kame strides briskly out the door, duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He throws the duffel in back and grins as he climbs in the front seat. Jin feels himself grinning back, stupidly.   
  
“Yo,” Kame greets as they pull away, stripping off the hat and glasses that do nothing to hide his identity anyway.   
  
“‘Sup?” Jin asks. He remembers riding around with Kame less than two months ago, feeling tense and angry at the sight of his profile out of the corner of his eye; feeling, somehow, betrayed by his stylish haircut and the frenzied collection of bangles and bracelets on his wrist. He’s a bit sheepish to realise that all the things he thought he hated about Kame are somehow acceptable, now that he knows there aren’t a million things that Kame hates about _him_.   
  
“I’m starving,” Kame says, slouching really low in the seat, knees propped up against the dash, feet kind of dangling below. He reaches out to skip the song – to skip Lil Wayne! – and Jin slaps his hand away but Kame somehow darts in with the other hand and presses the button, much to Jin’s indignation. Chamillionaire takes over and Kame surprises Jin by singing along, loudly and badly.   
  
“How do you even know this song?” Jin asks. “I thought you have better things to do than sit around watching MTV.” He makes his voice sound whiny and nasal, a pretty good approximation of Kame.   
  
“Koki is always playing it,” Kame says, not at all bothered. He digs through his bag and pulls out a bottle of water. Jin pulls up at the lights.   
  
“Does he still hate me?” he asks after a moment. It comes out before he can think about it and then just sits there, a bomb about to explode.   
  
Kame is still, water bottle open and halfway to his lips. It just hangs there. “Yeah,” he says, after a minute. “I think so.” He sips the water, twists the lid back into place. “We don’t talk about it.”   
  
Jin tries to swallow this with his chin up, but something inside him cracks with a dismal pop. “Fucker,” he says, a bit sadly.   
  
Kame looks out the window, like he’s trying really hard not to comment. He runs his hand through his hair and Jin says, “What?”  
  
“It’s not like you’ve done much to try and get him to forgive you,” Kame says. “Have you even tried to talk to him about it?”   
  
“I was just gonna give him some time,” Jin says.   
  
“You wussed out,” Kame replies. He keeps turning the water bottle over and over in his hands, the contents sloshing around inside.   
  
“Yeah,” Jin agrees. “Are you?” he asks. “Angry about it.”  
  
Kame doesn’t reply for a long time. He keeps looking out the window, face strange and strained. Jin waits and waits and then says, “Kamenashi?”  
  
Kame sighs. “Why are you doing this?” He makes a scrunchy face. “Are you trying to pick a fight?”  
  
“No!” Jin says defensively. “Aren’t we supposed to. I don’t know. Talk about it at some point? Isn’t that what people do?”  
  
Kame sighs. “Why?” he asks. “I don’t want to.” He squeezes his bottle and the plastic caves in a little on one side. “We’ve been doing so well.”  
  
They drive in silence for a while and Jin finally confesses, “Too well. It freaks me out.” He flexes his fingers on the steering wheel, focusing on the contraction of each muscle. “It seems too easy.”  
  
Kame laughs and twists in his seat, cheek lying against headrest. “Easy? It took us five years to get to this point. It’s not even like we’re swapping friendship bracelets and becoming blood brothers for life.” His face grows sober. “Look, if you want to rethink this whole thing…”   
  
Jin shouts, “NO,” then makes a face and says, “I just want to know if it’s going to come back to haunt me at some point.”  
  
“At some point,” Kame says, “but not right now.” He smiles at Jin, a little shyly. “I’d rather be happy than angry.”   
  
“At some point,” Jin repeats.  
  
“Yeah,” Kame says, looking forward. “Maybe.”  
  
—  
  
They go to an izakaya near Kame’s place to eat. All the private rooms are taken, so they settle into a secluded table in the corner, where it’s dark and shadowy and people will only notice them if they’re really looking. Even though they’re still supposed to be trying to get caught, it seems they have both been overtaken by the same reluctance to be seen. Whatever is happening between them is still private and fragile, and Jin is worried about what will happen in the face of too much public scrutiny. For the same reason, when Josh mails to ask where he’s at, Jin pretends he hasn’t seen it. They just need a little more time, first. To find their feet.  
  
Food is a comfortingly familiar ritual. Kame is still insane about tiny, insignificant details of the meal; he refuses to touch the mini spring rolls Jin orders because they’re a bit soggy and “look like baby’s fingers”. Jin still finds himself trying to force feed Kame, even though he longer seems to need to. It’s kind of delightful to see Kame stuffing his face with karaage. The little plates pile up on their table faster than the staff can clear them.   
  
Kame is just telling him about what his brothers are up to when a shadow falls over the table, and Jin glances up to see a stout, plain man staring down at them. He’s wearing a crisp white shirt and a black tie with a black cardigan.   
  
“Can we get some more beer?” Jin says, but the guy just stares at him and Jin scratches the back of his ear awkwardly.   
  
“Kazuya,” the guy says, and Jin looks at Kame to see the slight stiffness in his posture, his carefully pleasant face. Barely anyone calls Kame that; only his family and Taguchi, and occasionally Jin when he was feeling particularly affectionate. Way back when.   
  
“Oh,” Kame says. He bows slightly. “Hi.” He gestures between Jin and the interloper. “Akanishi, you remember Hitoshi-san.”   
  
_No,_ Jin wants to say, but instead he says, “Ah, of course…” He nods at the guy, noting the slight sheen of sweat at his temple and the serious set of his jaw. “Long time no see.”  
  
“Hello,” the guy says, a bit more curtly than Jin really feels he deserves, then looks at Kame. “How have you been?”  
  
“Oh, you know,” Kame laughs nervously. “The usual…”   
  
The guy just keeps staring at Jin. He prickles uncomfortably, shoving a prawn in his mouth just to have something to do. He tries to think back to when he has met this guy before, but comes up with nothing; maybe he met him when he was drunk some time and said something terrible to him. Probability: high.   
  
“How have you been?” Kame asks the guy – Hitoshi – after a moment of strained silence.   
  
“Fine,” Hitoshi says, still curt, and then, “I should let you get back to your dinner.”   
  
“It was nice seeing you,” Kame says lamely.   
  
“Yes,” the guy says, his stark expression unchanged. “Take care, Kazuya.”  
  
He just nods at Jin, and then he disappears, back into the restaurant, maybe down the stairs and out onto the street. Jin watches him go, then turns his gaze back to Kame, who has folded his arms on the table and buried his face in them.   
  
“That was awkward,” Kame says, voice muffled in his sleeves.  
  
“Who was that?” Jin asks, pouring Kame another glass of beer. “Your accountant?”  
  
Kame peeks up from his arms and says, “That’s my _ex_ ,” he says. “You’ve met him before. Twice.”   
  
Jin blinks. He probably should have guessed as much from the conversation, but it is impossible to believe that that guy, that plain, boring little guy with his pudgy face and his lousy salaryman haircut could ever interest someone like Kamenashi Kazuya.   
  
“I don’t remember,” Jin says.   
  
“Well,” Kame says, sitting up, finally, and picking up his beer stein, throwing back half of it in one gulp. “He certainly remembers you.”   
  
“You know, if that’s your ‘type’, then I don’t know if I’m flattered about your feelings for me anymore,” Jin snipes, wondering a second too late if he is breaking an unspoken agreement not to talk about Kame’s unrequited love; it might be a subject they’re better off avoiding.   
  
Kame just narrows his eyes, though, glaring at Jin witheringly. “He’s a very talented artist,” he says defensively. “Don’t be so superficial.”   
  
“He looks like a salaryman.” Jin tries to imagine them together; Kame’s delicate beauty is a total mismatch to that guy’s stubborn ordinariness. His brain will not supply the appropriate imagery.   
  
“He’s cute,” Kame says. “In his own way.”  
  
Jin sips his beer. “Why does he hate me so much?”  
  
Kame makes an awkward face. “He was always jealous of you, I guess.” He keeps pushing the piece of salmon he’s supposed to be eating around on his plate. “He probably wasn’t very happy to find us together.”   
  
Jin rolls up his sleeves, resting his elbows on the table. “You told him?”   
  
“No,” Kame says. He shoves the salmon in his mouth, finally, and they are silent while he chews and swallows. Then he says, “We were together for a little under two years. He could tell… something, I guess.” He puts his chopsticks down and pushes his plate away abruptly. “I don’t think he could tell how hopelessly unrequited it was.”  
  
Jin’s heart throbs in that way it does whenever he remembers how badly he has let Kame down; he spent much of their lives suffocating Kame with his zealous overprotection, so it is a bit brutal, now, to realise that he is the one who has inflicted the most damage.   
  
“Or how over,” Kame adds after a minute. “No matter what I told him, he’d never believe me.”   
  
They look at each other, and Jin says, “You’ll tell me, right?”   
  
Kame raises his eyebrows, waiting for Jin to continue his thought.  
  
“If it’s ever… not over. You’ll tell me.” The silence between them is uncomfortable in that way that serious emotional things always are when you have too much time to think them through. “You won’t just disappear on me again.”   
  
They stare at each other for a long moment and then Kame says, “It’s over.”   
  
“Kame,” Jin says, unhappily.   
  
Kame smiles at him easily and says, “Honestly, Akanishi, I was just a stupid kid.”  
  
Jin swallows, remembering that serious kid with his old man’s ways. “No, you weren’t.”  
  
“I know,” Kame says, half smile lifting his lip, “but let’s pretend I was.”  
  
—  
  
Kame is surprised by how much time Jin clears for him. When they’d been hanging out for professional reasons, Jin had haggled over every moment; he’d pretty much always had somewhere better to be, and he’d made Kame work for every minute they spent together.   
  
Now, Jin is being generous with his time, dropping by to have coffee when Kame can make a break in his schedule, sometimes waiting until the very early hours of the morning to eat dinner with Kame on his way home from work. They get caught by paparazzi in conbinis and coffee shops, always alone and ill-concealed, and their names are all over the news again. They have always been more powerful in combination than they could ever be alone. A blurry photograph of them looking in the window at a pet store knocks a story about Ryo’s drunken appearance in Tower Records to the third page. The Ryo story isn’t true, but according to Jin, he’s still kind of pissed off that his bad behaviour is considered less consequential than “AkaKame coo over cute animals”.   
  
Kame finds himself saving the stories he sees, tucking them into the box in his cupboard that still holds the t-shirt they made in Okinawa and the dog-eared script from _Gokusen 2_ that Jin had defaced with scribbled cartoons, a ton of faded polaroid photographs and the movies they’d made of themselves in Jin’s childhood bedroom when they were first learning to harmonise.   
  
Sometimes, at the very beginning of their feud, Kame would get those movies out and watch them and drink himself into a stupor, the sight of Jin’s grinning face like a bomb exploding in his heart. _You can do it,_ chibi Jin kept saying, because Kame would rewatch it over and over like a deranged lunatic. _You can do it. You can do it. You can do it._   
  
Sometimes, it felt like he couldn’t.   
  
He imagines if things ever fall apart between them he’ll dig these articles out in the same way; obsessively cataloguing the blurry smiles on Jin’s faces, the places where their bodies touch in each photo. Reminding himself that for a little while, he’d really stood there next to Jin, elbows bumping. Feeling happy. Feeling like himself again, maybe for the first time in five years.   
  
For now he puts them in the box with the other artefacts of his happiness and tries not to think about how terrified he is of the possibility of needing them again.  
  
—  
  
Kame has always been late with birthday gifts. Always. Even before their careers really blew up, he’d been totally hopeless at giving gifts on time. For most people, the gifts would trickle in weeks or sometimes months after their birthday, always almost nonsensically considerate and lavish considering their lateness.   
  
Jin’s gifts had always been on time, though. Jin knows that it is probably because of the fuss he would kick up if Kame had been late, but he doesn’t care. Kame had always gone out of his way to look after him. Right up until the troubles started.   
  
On Jin’s 27th birthday, he arranges to have the day off work because he’s honestly almost suicidally depressed at the idea of turning 27; it sounds like such a strange, adult age, like he should have the mess that is his life all sorted out by now, maybe with a wife and a second kid on the way. 27 year old Akanishi Jin should be so much more than Jin feels he is. He should have a short haircut and a sensible beige sedan and pick his kids up from kindergarten while the wife cooks dinner. Jin doesn’t have any of those things and refuses to acknowledge that the things he does have aren’t so bad either.  
  
When the doorbell chimes at 9:30am, he almost doesn’t answer it, but that is what stupid childish Akanishi Jin would do, not the actions of the cool, mature man he is determined to turn into overnight, so he drags himself out of bed and answers the door in his dressing gown, the sight of Kame dealing a fresh blow to his self esteem; out of all of his friends, Kame is the most mature, the kind of friend that a respectable adult should have. Kame is carrying coffee and fruit and pastries from an expensive French patisserie in the fancy suburb he lives in. He’s wearing a designer blazer and a silk scarf and it looks like he just shaved. Jin runs a hand through his sleep-matted hair sheepishly as Kame pushes his sunglasses up onto his head and grins hello.  
  
“Happy birthday,” Kame says. He hands Jin the food and then leans out of the doorway for a moment, reappearing with a gigantic cardboard box. Kame needs both his arms to carry it. It’s all squished at the corners and there are bits of packing tape stuck on it at random intervals, along with labels like _MASTER BEDROOM CUPBOARD_ and _STUDY ROOM_ in hastily scrawled permanent marker. In one corner, Jin’s own name is written in tiny English letters.  
  
“What is that?” Jin asks as Kame drops it on the coffee table with a heavy thud. The top of the box is taped up and Kame pulls his car keys out of his pocket and uses them to slice it open in one neat, efficient movement. Then he reaches out and takes one of the coffees from Jin’s hand and sits cross legged in front of the box, gesturing for Jin to do the same.  
  
“It’s every gift I’ve bought but not given you since 2005,” Kame says, in a kind of matter-of-fact way that makes it almost seem as if that isn’t totally insane.   
  
Jin flips the top of the box open as he sits next to Kame, their knees bumping together. He sifts through the contents; some are elaborately wrapped with ribbons and gift cards, others are just in the plastic bags they probably came in. Some are labelled with the year or occasion for which they were intended, carefully printed on post-its in Kame’s neatest handwriting; _Jin Birthday ’07_ or _Congratulations Jan ’10_.   
  
It’s bizarre because it isn’t as if Kame hasn’t given him gifts for the past five years; he has usually eventually gotten _something_ for his birthday, or even Christmas, even if it showed up a month late or seemed kind of generic, as if Kame had bought identical gifts in bulk for a dozen different people. The idea that he’d been collecting these gifts the whole time doesn’t make sense. Why go to all the effort of buying them and never actually _give_ them to him?  
  
“Sometimes it was because we weren’t talking, so it seemed weird to give you a gift,” Kame says, when Jin asks. “Sometimes it seemed like whatever I bought was too much, and you’d think it was creepy…” He rests his chin on his hand as Jin pulls out a box that is wrapped in handmade gold filigree paper, with a slick black satin ribbon. “Sometimes I just happened to see things you’d like and I’d get it for you and then not know how to give it to you. ‘Hey, Akanishi, I know I’m dead to you now but I really think you’ll like these cufflinks’. It seemed sort of pathetic, so I just… kept them.”   
  
“Which isn’t pathetic at all,” Jin comments.  
  
“Shut up and open your ridiculous backlog of gifts,” Kame says dryly, sipping at his coffee.  
  
The box contains all sorts of gifts; at least four designer t-shirts in varying styles and sizes, an expensive watch, the cufflinks Kame mentioned, which are jewel-encrusted and shaped like dollar signs. There are souvenirs from different places Kame has been, France and Korea and different cities in Japan. There’s a GPS system voiced by Snoop Dogg that is practically useless to him because it was designed for navigation in the US. A coffee table book about vintage pornography. A sophisticated electronic dictionary. A Giant plushie from Doraemon that looks like it came from a UFO catcher. An autographed Usher CD. Various necklaces. A book about Barack Obama. T-shirts from the KAT-TUN tours in which Jin did not participate. An antique metronome. A handmade leather wallet with Jin’s name stamped into the front. A copy of the very first magazine they ever appeared in together. A package of some obscure herbal medication that claimed it would boost your immune system. A bedazzled phone in the shape of a skull. An expensive looking bottle of French wine from the year of Jin’s birth. A round-faced signet ring emblazoned with an ornate gold A. A fluffy black coat that is at least four years out of style. A handful of photographs. Gift vouchers for golfing lessons. A purple beanie almost identical to the one stuffed in the back of his drawer. So much evidence that Kame hasn’t ever really left him behind.   
  
“This is so creepy,” Jin tries to say as he sifts through the bounty, but his voice cracks on the words and he realises with surprise that he is getting choked up, lump rising insistently in his throat.   
  
“Shut up,” Kame says self-consciously. Jin reaches out a bit desperately and hugs him before he can really think about it, arms gracelessly looping around his neck and holding tight. For a minute, Kame’s muscles are taught within the overbearing pressure of Jin’s headlock, but then he relaxes and claps a hand on Jin’s back in the manly, non-committal way that bros are supposed to. It surprises Jin, because Kame never hugged him like a bro before. He squeezes tighter and Kame breaks, fists his hand in the back of Jin’s t-shirt, breath hitching.   
  
Jin holds on a moment longer than is strictly socially acceptable, feeling a dizzying rush of relief; it’s a bit like the feeling of returning home after a too-long absence, looking around and realising almost everything is more or less the same as you left it, even if it feels like it should be totally different. In Jin’s arms, Kame’s shoulders are much broader than Jin remembers, firm muscles where Jin remembers pointy, fragile bone, but he still just sits there and lets Jin hug it out. He still feels different than anybody else.   
  
Jin coughs as he pulls away, feeling his cheeks flush pink and his breath stutter. “Thanks,” he says sheepishly. “I mean, it’s ok. I guess.” He pokes the pile of presents and a baby blue Tiffany’s box tumbles to the floor. “Did you even get me a new present?”   
  
Kame scowls, but his eyes are bright and he looks happy, which makes Jin feel like he might cry again. He reminds himself that he was feeling mopey and emotional before Kame even got here and that he’s not just turning into some kind of sentimental loser because Kame collected thousands of dollars worth of gifts for him like a deranged stalker.   
  
“You’re so spoiled,” Kame says, but he digs into his blazer pocket and hands Jin a long white envelope. Inside are season tickets for box seats at the soccer.   
  
“I bet you didn’t even have to pay for these,” Jin says. “You’re so stingy.”   
  
“I guess I’ll just give them to Nakamaru then,” Kame says, reaching out to try and pull the tickets out of Jin’s hands. Jin squawks and grips them with almost superhuman strength, wrestling them away and clutching them protectively to his chest.   
  
“They’re mine,” Jin hisses. “You gave them to me.”  
  
“Fuck, that hurt,” Kame complains, blowing on his finger where Jin has apparently gouged a hole in it in his panic.   
  
“Sorry,” Jin says, not feeling particularly apologetic. Just then, Josh wanders out of the spare room, hair sticking up on one side of his head and face all creased from the sheets. He is bleary eyed and stumbling.  
  
“You’re so noisy,” he moans, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “I’m trying to sleep, dude.”   
  
Kame is suddenly all tense and coiled like a wary cat, self consciously swiping his hair out of his eyes and adjusting the cuff of his shirt. It’s the first time he’s seen Josh since they made up and Jin feels a bit nervous too. He doesn’t want to examine why.   
  
“It’s my birthday,” Jin says. “ _Kame_ got up early and brought me breakfast.”  
  
“Good for Kame,” Josh yawns, collapsing on the couch. His skinny white ankles peek out the bottom of his sweats.   
  
“Kame’s actually already been at work for four hours,” Kame says wryly.   
  
Josh finally blinks into focus and sees the explosion of gifts on the coffee table. He just stares at it for ages and then shrugs and picks up the old porno book, murmuring, “Sweet!” without asking for an explanation.   
  
They all sit in silence for a while while Josh leafs through the book, and Jin wonders how it is possible that the happy atmosphere he’d felt a few minutes ago could have dissipated so quickly. He keeps looking between his friends and trying to figure out how to build a bridge between them; it reminds him a bit of the very earliest days when he started hanging out with Pi, when they’d all sit around Jin’s house and Jin would kill himself trying to force them to talk to each other and not just to him. Obviously, in the long run, that worked out, but Jin’s not quite sure how to get Kame and Josh to go from politely awkward silence to sharing their deepest darkest secrets without orchestrating a revival of his feud with Kame and Jin isn’t sure he wants to go that far. Or that it would work if he did. Josh isn’t exactly a good listener.  
  
Jin is still trying to think of a way to kickstart a conversation all three of them will enjoy when Kame looks at his watch, drains the rest of his coffee, and says, “I have to get back to work.”   
  
Jin’s head snaps up. “Huh?” he says, but Kame is already rising gracefully to his feet. Jin tries to stand as quickly and ends up smacking his shin on the coffee table. “You’re not staying?”   
  
Kame blinks at him, looking at bit guilt-stricken at the disappointed whine Jin can hear in his own voice. He picks up the satchel he’d left by the end of the couch and says, “I’ve got a full day.”  
  
“But it’s my _birthday_ ,” Jin says childishly. He follows Kame to the door and resists the urge to tug on his sleeve plaintively.   
  
“Bye,” Josh calls from the couch, still absorbed in a 1950s centrefold.   
  
“Can you at least come out tonight?” Jin asks. “We’re hitting the clubs.”   
  
“I’ll try,” Kame says.  
  
“Kameeeeee,” Jin whines.  
  
“Okay, okay,” Kame says. “I’ll call you when I get off. It’ll probably be late.”   
  
“It’s okay,” Jin says, grinning. “I’ll probably be drunk.”   
  
Kame rolls his eyes.  
  
—  
  
By the time Kame joins the party, Jin is already totally wasted and hanging affectionately from anyone who can support his body weight. At first, he doesn’t seem to notice that Kame has arrived, and whenever Kame tries to attract his attention someone moves between them to wish him a happy birthday. Kame gives up and goes to get a beer instead.   
  
Apparently, he just missed Pi, according to Ryo, who slings an arm around Kame’s neck and murmurs too close to his face, his breath beery and humid on his cheek. Then he says, “Be my wingman,” and manhandles Kame over to the other end of the bar where two blonde girls in vaguely matching minidresses are looking out over the dancefloor.   
  
Ryo slurs something in English that Kame doesn’t understand but assumes is offensive based only on the politely appalled looks on the girl’s faces. He smiles at them apologetically and says, in halting English, “I am sorry, he is drunk.”   
  
The girls have to lean in close to introduce themselves in equally halting Japanese. Ryo keeps trying to shift his weight off Kame’s shoulder and onto the taller girl’s, but Kame locks an arm around his waist to keep him from moving and he eventually subsides, resting his chin on Kame’s shoulder. Occasionally he whispers into his ear, messages that Kame is supposed to pass on, but Kame ignores them because it’s all stuff like, “ask if they’re up for a threesome” and “are her boobs real?” and Kame isn’t all that keen on getting slapped.   
  
Kame keeps glancing around plaintively, hoping to see one of Jin’s seemingly endless platoon of friends who can either take Ryo off his hands or adequately converse with these girls in English, but help is not forthcoming. Then, suddenly, a shove and Ryo’s dead weight on his left arm is joined by an equal load on his right, and Jin’s voice is in his ear.  
  
“KAME,” he shouts, body sprawled along Kame’s side and his hand in Ryo’s hair, holding the group of them together like a deformed three headed beast. “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?”  
  
“Right here,” Kame replies. “For ages.”  
  
When he twists his head, Jin’s face is millimetres away, cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling. His hair is sweat-soaked and sticking up on one side. He’s a mess. It makes Kame’s heart skip a beat.   
  
“Well, you’re here now,” Jin says, not seeming to process that Kame has been here the whole time. He shoves at Ryo’s shoulder and says, “Get off, dumbass.” To Kame, he says, “Come on,” as if he has been unforgivably dawdling.  
  
“Ok,” Kame says, and then Jin is tugging him around by the wrist, introducing him to about a billion drunken gaijin, half of whom Kame had already met anyway. Jin is mostly introducing him in English, and Kame doesn’t understand much of it, but he gets the gist that Jin is exhibiting him as one of his oldest and best friends, a guest of honour; the idea makes Kame almost embarrassingly happy. He smiles at them a bit self consciously, glad that the music is too loud in this part of the club to even try to converse. He has always been great with strangers, but these aren’t strangers, really. Their opinion matters to him, even if only in relation to Jin’s.   
  
Jin introduces him to Peter twice, but pulls him away before they can do much more than say hello; as they walk away, he keeps warning Kame that Peter wants to get in his pants and seems determined to protect his virtue, which he finds kind of hilarious.   
  
“You can do better,” Jin hisses, arm slung protectively around his neck.  
  
—  
  
A little after 4am, Kame herds Jin and all his drunken friends home, not trusting them to make the four block walk home on their own without getting beat up or arrested. Jin hangs on Kame the whole way back, singing happy birthday to himself at the top of his lungs. When they get to his building, Kame has to dig through his pocket to get his key out because Jin is being uncooperative. He keeps giggling and slapping Kame’s hand away, accusing him, without bite, of trying to cop a feel.   
  
“Do you need to puke?” Kame asks, holding him up as he toes his sneakers off just inside the door.   
  
“‘M’not that drunk,” Jin insists, but his hand mashes Kame’s hair into his face as he tries to stand upright again, so Kame doesn’t really believe him. Behind them, the five or so guys that followed them back from the club spill into the apartment and make themselves at home; this, Kame can tell, is something of a routine to them.  
  
Jin stumbles into his room and collapses on the bed. As he falls, he nudges Kusano, who is already curled up half asleep. “Get off,” Jin slurs. “Kazu and I are gonna have a slumber party.”   
  
Kame, who had been unaware he was expected to stay over, says, “Huh?” but then Jin grabs his arm and pulls and Kame falls onto the bed just as Kusano is crawling off it.   
  
“Like old times.” Jin nuzzles into his pillow, then calls for Kusano to shut the door as he leaves.  
  
For a minute, Kame just sits totally still. ‘Like old times’ means something totally different for him than it does for Jin; for Jin, they’d always just been two totally platonic friends sleeping squished together in a tiny bed, sometimes whispering secrets in the dead of night in a not at all gay way. For Kame, it had required an almost draconian control of his libido, a self-denial more appropriate for a medieval monk than a seventeen year old boy. He’s not a horny teenager anymore, but he’s also not a saint, and for a minute he wants to tell Jin that and storm out in a huff.  
  
Then Jin rolls onto his back and burps loudly, and Kame thinks his libido might not be such a problem after all.  
  
“Turn off the lights,” Jin whines, tugging his belt free of the loops and tossing it across the room. As Kame gets up and switches the lights off Jin squirms out of his jeans and under the covers, still wearing his hoodie. In the dark, Kame steps out of his own jeans and flannel shirt, slipping into bed in his boxers and undershirt. After a few minutes, Jin sits up and pulls his hoodie and t-shirt over his head, throwing it on the floor. In the moonlight filtering through the window, Kame can see the smooth skin on his arms and his pale, vulnerable looking chest. He looks untouched. Kame closes his eyes and buries his face in his pillow, pulling the covers all the way to his chin.   
  
They lie in the dark and Kame listens to the reassuring puff of Jin’s breath, deep and steady with a slight wheeze from all the chain smoking. Just as he’s about to sleep, Jin speaks, so quietly that at first Kame thinks he dreamed it.  
  
“I think I grew up kind of crap.”  
  
He sounds more sober than he did twenty minutes ago, but emotional in that way that only exhausted drunk people get. Kame opens his eyes, blinking until they adjust, and sees Jin with his eyes wide open staring at him.   
  
Kame looks back at him. “Why?”  
  
Jin shrugs, sniffing, as if he can somehow make this earnest 4am exchange vaguely casual. “I haven’t done anything I wanted to do by now.”  
  
Kame frowns. “You’ve done plenty,” he says. “I’d hardly call being the first Johnny to make it to the States a lack of accomplishment.”   
  
“That’s work stuff,” Jin says dismissively. He starts pulling at the stitching on the corner of Kame’s pillow, tugging the threads free. “I thought I’d have a family by now.”   
  
Kame doesn’t say anything.  
  
“I thought I’d find a cute wife and I’d retire and open a club or something, and we’d have like two kids by the time I was thirty. And we’d be happy.” He sniffs. “I never found her though.”  
  
“You will,” Kame says confidently, though it hurts him a bit to do so.   
  
“Yeah?” Jin asks.   
  
“Yeah,” Kame says. In the dark, Jin fumbles until he finds Kame’s hand lying beside his pillow. His fingers wrap around the outside of Kame’s and squeeze.   
  
“I missed you,” Jin murmurs.   
  
Kame can’t say anything, his throat feels so swollen and bare. He curls his head until their joined fingers nudge against his temple. After a few minutes, Jin shifts and their knees bump together. Kame falls asleep like that, listening to Jin wheeze.


	4. Part Four

Jin is unprepared for the return of his psychotic preoccupation with knowing Kame’s whereabouts at any given moment of the day. He’d had a kind of vague, abstract memory of being like that as a teenager, but he’d figured the feeling had been exaggerated in his memory, rather than totally and completely understated.   
  
He’s always been a bit overbearing and possessive with his friends, his sense of entitlement increasing the closer he gets to them, but this is extreme even for him. As a kid, if he’d wanted to know where Kame was, he’d have just called or emailed _where are you_ , simple and direct, not bothering to reply if the answer was not particularly worrying or interesting. Now, though, they’re in this in-between period where he’s not sure it is really his business to know, so he just sits there staring at his phone, willing Kame to suddenly email and tell him. Usually he breaks after an hour of psychic compulsion fails to produce results, sending a painstakingly casual message like, _I’m chillin’ with the boys, sup?_ and hoping Kame will respond in kind.   
  
He’s never been sure what it is that he thinks will happen in his absence, just that the idea that Kame is out there somewhere in the world and Jin doesn’t know where fills him with a creeping anxiety, slowly growing in intensity the longer Kame is gone. Jin is not at all sure how they managed to cease all social contact for five years, as they’ve been friends again for less than two months and he’s already at the point where he’s freaking out if Kame doesn’t contact him for two hours at a time.   
  
Josh is just about ready to kill him. They’re supposed to be working, laying down demos for Jin’s next CD, but Jin’s attention keeps drifting from the music in front of him, gnawing away at him until he picks up his phone and checks it just to make sure he hasn’t missed a message; his phone is always accidentally switching itself onto silent, and it could totally sit there vibrating without him noticing.   
  
“If you touch that phone one more time it is going out the window,” Josh threatens after about an hour of this. He hits save forcefully and glares at Jin. “Why don’t you just call him?”   
  
“Who?” Jin asks innocently.   
  
“‘Who’,” Josh mimics. “Kamenashi, right?”   
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jin protests. “I’m just checking the scores.”  
  
Josh stares at him skeptically. “What scores?”   
  
“Um.” Jin coughs. It is midweek; they are probably not playing soccer anywhere in the world right now. “I’m playing Words With Friends with some guy in Arizona.”   
  
Josh tears the phone out of Jin’s hands.   
  
“I’m improving my vocabulary!” Jin cries. By the time Josh lets him have his phone back four hours later, he has about a dozen messages from Kusano and three from Kame, who is on location in Yokohama. The tiny, hysterical voice at the back of Jin’s mind subsides, and he sends back a photo of Josh’s aggravated, tired face.  
  
—  
  
  
“Did you meet Suzuki Sho?” Jin’s manager’s assistant asks him one day. She’s kind of strict and would not usually be this informal with him, but the phone call she’s just received has apparently shocked her into delinquency. She is staring at him sort of open-mouthed.  
  
“I don’t know,” Jin says. “Who?”  
  
“He’s the head of Sony’s marketing division,” she says. “He wants to talk to you about being the spokesman for their new line of mp3 players.”  
  
Jin frowns. “I’m really more of an iPod man…”   
  
“Akanishi-san!” she snaps. “This is a very big contract. A very important contract.”   
  
Jin shrinks in his chair and nods compliantly.   
  
“He said he met you at a function recently,” she is making notes the old fashioned way with pen and paper. “You don’t remember?”  
  
Something dimly bubbles up in Jin’s brain; a little man in a shiny suit who kept talking about Jin’s wild and sexy image while Kame abandoned him to get them some drinks. He’d given Jin a business card that he tucked in his wallet and forgot about. He pulls it out now and looks at it; _Suzuki Sho, Director of Marketing._  
  
“Oh,” he says, “Yeah,” and hands her the card.   
  
She sighs and takes the card, then disappears to find Jin’s real manager.   
  
Jin calls Kame, “Were you pimping me out at that party the other day?” He’d been distracted by all the delicious miniature food that hot waitresses kept bringing past, but now that he thinks about it Kame did introduce him to a lot of old guys in nice clothes.   
  
“Yeah,” Kame says.   
  
“Oh,” Jin says. “Really?”  
  
“Of course,” Kame says. He sounds distracted; there’s a lot of noise in in the background. “Why do you think Johnny wanted you to hang out with me?”   
  
Jin remembers Josh’s theory about him giving Kame a bit of street cred and winces, because this makes a lot more sense. “………………..Oh.”   
  
“Did you get a job?” Kame asks.   
  
“Yeah,” Jin says.   
  
“Good,” Kame says. “Now we don’t have to go to that gala thing on Sunday.”   
  
“You said there was going to be motorcycle racing,” Jin says suspiciously.  
  
“I lied,” Kame says, and hangs up.   
  
—  
  
Jin forces Kame to join Facebook. Actually, it’s more like Jin joins Facebook on Kame’s behalf, commandeering the computer while Kame lies on the bed, flicking through some pretentious-looking photography magazine.   
  
“Isn’t it against the rules?” Kame asks. “What if the fans find it?”   
  
“How would they find it?” Jin asks. “As far as Facebook is concerned you’re a 53 year old woman from Uruguay.” He angles the computer so Kame can see his profile photo, a frumpy, grumpy looking woman with a stern expression. His name is apparently Caoimhe Gonzalez.   
  
“What’s the point, then?” Kame abandons the magazine and crawls off the bed so he can sit cross-legged on the floor next to Jin.   
  
“So you can keep in touch with your friends,” Jin says. “It’s _utilitarian._ ”  
  
“But none of my friends are on Facebook,” Kame replies.   
  
“I am,” Jin says. “And Josh, and Ryo.”   
  
“Oh, yeah,” Kame says flatly. “I’m sure my best friends Josh and Ryo are just dying to add me.”   
  
“Ryo already did,” Jin says smugly. Kame leans in to look at the news feed, seeing that Caoimhe is now friends with John Thompson, an old black man in a sombrero. Ryo, apparently. The rest of the news feed is full of updates from celebrities and companies that Jin has apparently decided Kame ‘likes’; Justin Timberlake and Johnny Depp and Tokyo Disney. Kanye West has updated about ten times in a row. At the bottom of the page, _Caoimhe Gonzalez likes Jin Akanishi_.   
  
“Oh look,” Jin says, just as a little red flag appears at the top of the page. “There’s your best friend Josh.”  
  
Josh is listed as Josh Rules, with a photo of his stupid gaijin face. A few seconds after he accepts the request, the first message on Kame’s wall appears.   
  
_sup man nice pic lol_  
  
“But he hates me,” Kame says, incredulously.  
  
“No he doesn’t,” Jin says reassuringly. “Don’t be so paranoid.”  
  
Kame rolls his eyes. “Then why did he tell a total stranger in a bar that I ‘sucked a lot of cock to get where I am’?”   
  
Jin stares at him open mouthed. “What? When?!”   
  
“I don’t know,” Kame says, grumpily slumping to one side, a little further out of Jin’s reach. “Ages ago. Before you left KAT-TUN, even. I’d never even met him.” He picks at a loose thread on his jeans. “Word spreads fast, though. This town is smaller than you’d think.”  
  
“That doesn’t sound like Josh,” Jin says, unconvincingly. “It was probably Bryan.”  
  
“I don’t even know who that is!” Kame protests.  
  
“He went back to America,” Jin says. “But it sounds just like him.”  
  
“Or maybe you’re just friends with lots of assholes.” Kame crosses his arms, now in an irrevocably bad mood.   
  
“No,” Jin says insistently. “They’re nice. I just poisoned them against you.” Jin ‘likes’ Josh’s comment. “Josh promised he’d give you a clean slate. I kind of just assumed he’d get the same from you.”   
  
Kame stares at Jin and wonders how Jin is the one that convinced all his friends that Kame is some kind of career prostitute but he’s the one that ends up feeling guilty. After a minute, he says grudgingly, “Ok, ok.”  
  
“Besides,” Jin says. “At least I introduce you to my friends. I don’t even know who yours are.”   
  
Kame blinks. “I’ve introduced you to my friends…” he says, a bit uncertainly, because he hasn’t, really.  
  
“Not those rich dudes you ‘network’ with,” Jin says. Kame has taken him to a few dinners with influential businessman essentially fulfilling his end of the bargain with Johnny. Getting Jin out there. Letting people know he’s not just an erratic, temperamental brat, that he’s also delightful. “They don’t count. And not KAT-TUN, they don’t count either. Or your brothers.”  
  
Kame sighs and thinks of Mori, who keeps inviting him out even though Kame has repeatedly blown him off. He’s seen Jin three times this week. He’s probably seen Mori three times in the past three months.   
  
“Why?” Kame says finally. “You always hate my friends.”  
  
“That’s not true!” Jin protests, and sometimes Kame can’t believe how self-deluded Jin is. “We have loads of mutual friends.”  
  
“Sure,” Kame says. “People we met together, or people you introduced me to.” Jin is still staring at him wide-eyed, as if he can’t believe that Kame is spreading such outrageous lies.  
  
“What about… what’s his face… the baseball guy. With the zits.”   
  
Juri-kun. Jin had met him for about twenty minutes one afternoon when Kame was about 15, which was apparently long enough for Jin to decide that he was using Kame because he was a Johnny and that Kame should be careful. Every time Kame had mentioned him Jin had said, “I don’t know about that guy…” until he moved halfway across the country and Kame rarely saw him anymore, and suddenly Jin’s feelings about him became totally neutral.  
  
“Whatever,” Kame sighs. “If you want to meet my friends, then fine. I’ll set it up.”   
  
“I’m sure I’ll love them,” Jin says confidently.  
  
—  
  
Jin hates them.   
  
Especially stupid, pretentious M-san, who keeps going on and on about photography stuff that Jin doesn’t understand and can’t imagine ever caring about. He keeps making stupid camera-related jokes and then he and Kame laugh as if they’re totally hilarious. His name isn’t even really M. M isn’t even really a name. He’s really stupid, boring, Mori.   
  
Jin tries to smile and be charming, though, because Kame keeps looking at him with a little knowing smirk, and Jin refuses to let him see that he was right. He beams back at Kame to show what a great time he’s having. Talking about cameras. In Japanese. In some old guy’s living room. Jin smiles forcefully.   
  
Eventually, the subject turns to M’s new line. He brings out some sketches and samples to show Kame, who exclaims over them as if they’re life-changing pieces of fashion history and not just slightly customised jeans and t-shirts. The t-shirts are familiar-looking, and Jin realises with an almost alarming stab of resentment that he’s seen Kame wearing slight variations on the design about a thousand times. He was wearing one two days ago when they took their dogs for a walk in Yoyogi Park.   
  
“Ahh, awesome,” Jin says, with elaborate enthusiasm, pretending not to notice when Kame looks at him, eyes alight with amusement. “You’re really talented, M-san.”   
  
“Isn’t he?” Kame says. “Which is your favourite, Akanishi?”  
  
Jin scowls at him. “The red one,” he says.   
  
“Which red one?” M asks. There are three red t-shirts spread in a row; one is emblazoned with the signature M in white, one is covered in grungy, clashing pink stars, and the other has a verse of poetry in English that even Jin can tell does not make sense.   
  
“The M,” Jin says after a long, slightly awkward pause.  
  
“It’s yours,” M grins, gathering it in his hands and presenting it grandly to Jin as if it is a generous gift and he is not essentially using Jin as a living billboard.  
  
“Thanks,” Jin says. He aims for a genuine smile but he’s pretty sure it ends up coming out closer to a grimace. “I’ll… wear it.”   
  
Kame clears his throat and when Jin looks at him he’s got his hand over his mouth as if he was coughing, but Jin knows he was laughing. That fucker.   
  
The other guys sitting around seem like they are maybe not so bad, but they are friends with The Enemy so Jin is pretty sure they must be pretty crap underneath their harmless facades. He talks to one guy about movies, which is okay at first, but he has this way of talking about Kame as if he knows him really well, as if explaining him to Jin, and that relationship quickly grows sour. Well, for Jin. The other guy still seems pretty into it.  
  
Jin endures for two hours, and then he yawns loudly and says, “Well, I’m beat.”   
  
It is 10pm, and he knows Kame wants to laugh at him again, but he goes along with it. “Yeah, I have to get up early tomorrow.” He stands, stretching out his muscles. “We should get out of here.”  
  
“Yes,” Jin says, hoping that his relief is not too apparent. M-san walks them to the door, where they all hover uncomfortably for a minute before M gives Kame a half hug and kisses him on the cheek. Jin’s body is all stiff with apprehension, but M does not touch him.   
  
Kame’s number one closest friend joins them and says, “I’m having a show next month.” He smiles into Kame’s eyes and Jin wants to tell them to get a room. The guy is sort of short and weedy and plain, but Kame’s ex looks like a math teacher, so Jin’s not entirely sure that rules him out in Kame’s books. “Well, a group show. But I’m in it. You should come.” He glances at Jin. “You too, Akanishi-kun.”   
  
Kame glances at him sidelong and Jin blurts, “We’ll be there!” He wonders who this enthusiastic person is. “With bells on.”   
  
“Wonderful!” The guy says, and finally, they’re allowed to leave.  
  
“With bells on?” Kame asks as they walk down the path. They’d parked almost four blocks away.   
  
Jin sniffs. “I’m excited to see my new friend’s work,” he says haughtily.   
  
“Uh huh,” Kame says dubiously.  
  
Jin is insistent. “I am an enthusiastic patron of the arts.”   
  
“Okay,” Kame says, but he’s still smiling in that annoying, obnoxious way, like Jin doesn’t even have to be honest because Kame sees right through him anyway.   
  
“I can’t believe I forgot to get his number,” Jin says. “I totally wanted to hang out again soon.”   
  
It’s starting to rain. Kame pulls a tiny leopard print umbrella out of his bag and unfolds it over their heads. Jin squeezes as close to Kame’s body as possible, but he can feel fat, warm drops of rain on his elbow. He reaches out and takes the umbrella so he can hold it a little higher. Kame is too short and the spines kept getting tangled in Jin’s hair.   
  
“I’ll just text him your number,” Kame says. “And tell him to give you a call.”  
  
“NO,” Jin explodes, scowling as Kame starts laughing. He pulls the umbrella away maliciously, watching with satisfaction as the rain paints dark spots on Kame’s t-shirt and his hair starts to turn frizzy. Kame runs a hand through his hair and the frizziness disappears into slick, dark strips in the path left by his fingers. He plasters himself to Jin’s side, grabbing Jin’s wrist so he can’t pull the shelter away. Jin feels the wet splodges on Kame’s shoulder rubbing against his arm and his skin prickles uncomfortably.   
  
“You totally hated them,” Kame says with obnoxious confidence. “You’re like the most transparent person in the world.”   
  
Jin huffs. “I’m just shy.”   
  
Kame looks up at him through damp lashes, knowing and sly. “Last night you danced on a table with a European princess in front of about two hundred people.”   
  
“I was drunk,” Jin objects. “And she’s not a princess. She’s the ambassador’s daughter.”   
  
“Whatever,” Kame says. He scratches lazily at his wet t-shirt. “You’re such a snob.”   
  
“ _I’M_ a snob,” Jin explodes. He shoves Kame, who grabs Jin’s arm to stop from toppling over into the gutter. “Your friends may as well be sitting around in black turtlenecks talking about French existentialism.”   
  
“They’re nice,” Kame says. “And I think they’re interesting.”   
  
Jin frowns. “I’m not interesting?”   
  
Kame stares at him. “Why are you like this?” They’ve finally reached his car and Kame leaves the shelter of the umbrella to cross to the driver’s side door. Jin stands on the footpath, shoulders hunched and scowling. “I’ve never met anyone who is so simultaneously full of himself and pathologically insecure.”   
  
“HEY,” Jin objects, scrambling to fold the umbrella and get in the car when Kame opens the door and disappears inside. When he finally slides into the passenger seat Kame is messing with his hair in the rear view mirror, shaking out the moisture with his fingers. Jin crosses his arm and sniffs, waiting for Kame to apologise. He waits for almost a minute, then, realising the apology is not forthcoming, shoves Kame in the side of the head, messing up Kame’s careful reconstruction of his hairstyle.   
  
Kame laughs. “It’s okay if you hate them,” he says. “It doesn’t matter to me.”  
  
“I’m not full of myself!” Jin cries.   
  
“Mm,” Kame hums noncommittally, turning the key in the ignition.  
  
“And I hate your friends because they’re pretentious nerds who are obviously using you just to sell their shitty t-shirts,” Jin continues. “If you made some proper friends I might like them.”  
  
Kame snorts.   
  
Jin glares at him. “What?”  
  
“Nothing,” Kame says, pulling into the street. The radio is softly playing the Keri Hilson CD Jin put on earlier.   
  
“ _What?_ ” Jin repeats insistently. “Spit it out.”   
  
“I don’t know,” Kame shrugs. “It seems like I could bring Pi over to meet you and you’d tell me that you thought I’d made friends with a serial killer.”  
  
Jin narrows his eyes. “I would not,” he says obstinately. “I’m not some jealous freak.”  
  
“I didn’t say that,” Kame sighs. “You’re just a bit. You know. Protective, maybe.”   
  
“What’s wrong with that?” Jin asks.  
  
“Nothing,” Kame says. “But you don’t need to. I can look after myself. And I do, I promise.”   
  
“You do not,” Jin says. “You just let people take and take and take from you.”  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” Kame says. “I never let anybody take anything I don’t want to give.”   
  
Jin looks at him. “Even me?”  
  
Kame glances at him and then back at the road.   
  
“Even you,” he says after a minute, but Jin isn’t sure that he believes him.   
  
—  
  
They’re sitting around a coffee shop one day when Josh says, “I need to get some new duds.”  
  
Kame isn’t really listening to the conversation, even though he is aware they are speaking Japanese for his benefit. He is leafing through a script his manager is trying to get him the lead in; he would be playing an ex-police officer who turns to crime to pay his sick mother’s medical bills. Reading the script, Kame doubts he’ll get the role and doesn’t really want it anyway. The script is pretty bad and the role calls for him to shave his head. When he told Jin, he laughed for about twenty minutes and has been calling him bozu ever since. Kame’s hair has made a lot of sacrifices for his career over the years, but this might be too far even for him.  
  
“Why?” Jin asks. He’s sitting cross-legged on the couch and his foot keeps jiggling against Kame’s thigh. Kame puts his hand on Jin’s ankle to make him stop.   
  
“I met this girl,” Josh says sheepishly. “She’s all fancy and shit. I think she only agreed to go out with me because I was driving your car.”   
  
Kame isn’t sure how Jin’s car could possibly make anybody dateable. It’s huge and always full of junk, old magazines and soda cans, discarded clothes, empty McDonalds bags and half-full bottles of Iced Tea. It’s a giant, portable dumpster.  
  
“I figured I’d get some nice clothes, take her some place pricey.” Josh makes a sheepish face and stirs his coffee. “Can’t hurt, right?”  
  
“She sounds like a bitch,” Jin says.  
  
“Yeah,” Josh says. “But she’s _hot_ , so whatevs.”  
  
“Pathetic,” Jin groans. “Okay, so we’ll go shopping. I’ll fit you out nice.”   
  
“Yeah,” Josh says, and then pauses cautiously for a minute and says, “Actually, I was thinking the Eternal Jeanist could help me out.”  
  
Kame looks up and realises Josh is staring at him and Jin is looking mutinously between them.  
  
“Fuck you,” Jin says. “I’m fashionable.”  
  
They all stare at his dirty jeans and stretched out hoodie for a few minutes, and Jin repeats, “Fuck you,” crossing his arms over his chest to hide the coffee stain he’s obviously just noticed beneath the collar.  
  
Kame puts down his script. “What’s your price range?”  
  
Josh looks at him and then says, “Um, how much did your outfit cost…”   
  
Kame just came from taping some new promos for _Going_. He looks down at himself, the cashmere sleeves pushed up to the elbow and the tweed stovepipes, perfectly tailored. “You should probably aim lower.”   
  
“That means his pants probably cost more than your rent,” Jin says. He reaches out and feels the fabric stretched over Kame’s knee. “I think this fabric is woven from diamonds and unicorn fur.”   
  
“Unicorns don’t have fur,” Kame says. “And shut up, it’s not like I paid for them.”  
  
He has equally outrageously priced trousers at home that he did pay for, but he’s not going to own up to that any time soon, even if Jin is a gigantic hypocrite who regularly wears a watch that looks like it was hand crafted by Zsa Zsa Gabor.   
  
“I just want nice pants,” Josh says sadly.   
  
“There’s always Aoki Slim,” Kame says, slouching and resting his coffee on his knee. He has to lift it up to avoid spilling it all over his ridiculously overpriced pants when Jin elbows him in the side.  
  
“Don’t be a dick,” Jin says. “Help my boy out.”   
  
Kame laughs. “It’s alright,” he tells Josh, smiling reassuringly. “I’ll look after you.”  
  
“Thanks,” Josh says, but the smile he returns is uncertain, and he looks like he is already doubting his own wisdom.  
  
—  
  
Two and a half hours later, Kame is standing outside the change room in a swanky Ginza boutique, angrily knocking on the door and commanding that Josh come out. The manager has already offered to comp Josh’s outfit in exchange for Kame’s promise that he’ll also take one of their coats and wear it on TV. It would be great, if Josh would just come out and let him see the fucking outfit.   
  
“Come on,” he says, rapping sharply on the door. At first he’d been sweet and cajoling, but his patience with that had run out quickly. Jin is sitting on a loveseat across the room, flipping through a French fashion magazine full of half-naked supermodels and drinking his second glass of champagne.   
  
“Take your time, buddy,” he calls, ignoring Kame’s dirty look.  
  
“What’s the problem?” Kame asks, resting his head on the doorframe. He’d had plans this evening, but it doesn’t look like they’re getting out of here any time soon.  
  
A long silence, and then Josh’s tiny, muffled voice: “These pants are _really tight_ ,” he says.   
  
Kame sighs.   
  
“I just realised I’m fat,” Josh says. “I look like a tub of lard.”   
  
Kame frowns. He’d chosen some black slimline pants and a soft, grey sweater with a loose, fluid collar and a few silver threads running through it.   
  
The muffled voice is a bit hysterical. “Plus I’m fucking sparkling like Edward Cullen!”   
  
Kame turns and looks at Jin, who shrugs and pours himself another glass of champagne from the bottle the manager left them. Kame’s own glass is abandoned on the table on the other side of the room. Kame sighs.   
  
“I thought you wanted to get laid,” he snaps finally. “Suck it up.”   
  
A pause, and then Josh opens the door; he tugs the sweater out of shape at the waist and whines, “My thighs look all bulgy.”   
  
“No,” Kame says. “It’s good. You look hot.”   
  
Josh turns and looks at himself in the mirror, frowning uncertainly. He fiddles with the collar. Then, without looking at Kame, he asks, “Would you date me?”   
  
“Sure,” Kame lies. He brushes a piece of lint of Josh’s shoulder. “You’re sweeping me off my feet right now.”  
  
Jin chokes on his champagne and splutters, “GROSS.”   
  
Kame ignores him and claps his hands over Josh’s shoulders, massaging them like he’s a heavyweight champion about to step into the ring. “You’ll be fine,” he says, then peers up at Josh’s sandy hair. “We should probably make an appointment at my salon, though.”  
  
Josh’s hands fly up to his hair. “What does that mean?” he asks. “What’s wrong with my hair?”  
  
“Nothing…” Kame says hesitantly. “I mean, it’s fine… I guess…”  
  
Josh spins around and asks Jin, “Is my hair ugly?”   
  
Jin shrugs. “I thought you wanted it to look like that.”  
  
“Like what?” Josh asks.   
  
“You know…” Jin says. “Like a scarecrow.”   
  
“ASSHOLE,” Josh yelps.   
  
“It’ll be fine,” Kame says. “My stylist is a miracle worker.”  
  
—  
  
Later, when Josh is having his pants altered and the manager is going through their coats and holding them up against Kame’s body trying to find the perfect fit, Jin tugs his sleeve and says, “Thanks.” The whole ordeal, his cancelled plans and the wasted afternoon, suddenly seems worth it.  
  
“No problem,” Kame says, then, because it will make Jin happy, and Josh isn’t around to hear, “He’s not so bad.”  
  
“He’s retarded,” Jin says, but he’s smiling shyly, obviously pleased.   
  
The manager holds out a burnt orange blazer for Kame to try on. He’d never choose it himself but the fabric is soft and it fits perfectly across the shoulders, almost like it had been tailored for him; it doesn’t pull too tight across his right bicep like his coats usually do.   
  
Jin helps him smooth down the sleeves, tugging childishly at the cuffs. He turns the collar down where it sticks up a little in back, and then he says, “You look great,” standing so close that Kame wants to shove him away.  
  
For a second, all Kame can think is, _don’t do this to me_ , and then he’s saved by Josh’s return, Jin stepping neatly away as if Kame had imagined the whole thing.  
  
—  
  
Johnny has always been in the habit of making sudden decisions on their behalf and forgetting to notify them before the media did it for them. If their normal managers are working on a project, they might get two or three month’s notice. If the project is Johnny’s baby, they’re lucky to get a week.  
  
This is how Jin finds himself with three weeks to plan a three-night stint in Seoul. In theory, this shouldn’t that difficult; it is essentially a rehash of the shows he’d done on home turf earlier in the year. Except that Jin can’t remember his own lyrics or choreography, and most of his dancers have scattered into other jobs or back to the States; even Dom and Joey have abandoned him. Johnny says he has to use the Juniors anyway, but won’t let him take the best ones because they’re getting ready for Dream Boys. So basically, Jin is fucked.  
  
Kame, who has been touring on and off all year in between filming _Going_ and doing the five bajillion other things they sign him up for, is unsympathetic. He meets Jin in the common room after _Dream Boys_ rehearsal, hair tied up like a stupid, comforting pineapple, and proceeds to roll his eyes and disparage Jin’s whining.  
  
“Oh no,” he says, voice flat. “You’ve got to go to Korea and do a solo show and you get total artistic control.” He pulls the hair tie out of his hair and the pineapple collapses in a wave across his brow. “I don’t care what they say, life’s hard for Akanishi Jin.”   
  
“Shut your face,” Jin says. “It is, okay?”   
  
Kame snorts. “Come back to me and complain when you’re playing the same character in a musical for the sixth year running. Seventh? I don’t even know anymore.”   
  
Jin frowns. “You love doing _Dream Boys_.”   
  
Kame shrugs and steals Jin’s soda. “It would be nice to do something new.” He sips through Jin’s straw, laughing. Bitterly, maybe, just a little. A breathy, cold sound. “Every year Johnny promises it is just one more year…”   
  
It had honestly never occurred to Jin that Kame might struggle with his obligations. He’s always been such a stoic workaholic that Jin had always assumed that the idea of revolt had never even occurred to him. The idea of Kame doing _Dream Boys_ year in year out when he doesn’t even want to is depressing and Jin momentarily considers staging some kind of coup on his behalf.  
  
“Oh well,” Kame says after a minute. “Working with the kids is fun.”   
  
That reminds Jin of his own troubles, and he rips his soda out of Kame’s hand.   
  
“You took all the good juniors,” he grumbles.   
  
Kame frowns, crossing his arms. “Shut up, they’re all good.”   
  
Jin leans over and rests his forehead on the table. “I don’t even recognise any of them anymore,” he says. “What happened to Yabu?”  
  
Kame blinks. “Are you serious?”   
  
“What?” Jin stares back, clueless.   
  
“He’s in Hey Say Jump, Jin. He debuted.”  
  
“Oh,” Jin says. “Right.”   
  
“Unbelievable,” Kame mutters. He folds his elbows and rests his head on them so he and Jin can lie eye to eye.   
  
“Don’t berate me when I’m having troubles,” Jin whines. “What am I gonna do?”   
  
“You should see it as an opportunity,” Kame says, rubbing his cheek sleepily on his sleeve. “Any one of those kids would lose a limb to dance for you. Educating them is your legacy.”   
  
“As if,” Jin snorts, but Kame’s face is so earnest that it makes his stomach skitter nervously. He never understands how Kame can do this; half the time he’s such a bitch, but when he’s being serious it’s like sitting in front of Mother Teresa, calm and serene.  
  
“You’ve forgotten,” Kame scolds softly. He nudges Jin with his shoulder. Jin pushes back half-heartedly. “Where would we be if Koichi hadn’t chosen us?”  
  
Jin stacks his fists one on top of the other and rests his chin on them, thinking back. How young and stupid they’d been. The arrogance of their excitement. He’s never really connected those early days to anything that came after – how Koichi gave him KAT-TUN and KAT-TUN gave him the world. He sighs.  
  
“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”   
  
—  
  
 _New Johnny’s Junior unit _Baddaz_ are preparing to make their stage debut in Seoul. Formed by Akanishi Jin (27) as backdancers for his forthcoming Korean debut, the group consists of Mizuki Yuu (15), Taguchi Kunimitsu (15), Tsuchiya Yuuichi (14), Mikey Jones (14), and Asou Akira (14). Their selection marks the first time that Akanishi has worked with Johnny’s Juniors since his departure from KAT-TUN in 2010._   
– Yahoo Japan  
  
—  
  
They don’t see each other for a couple of weeks. For Kame, days pass in a blur of feather boas and sparkling boxing gloves, sorting out adolescent spats between the juniors. At the end of the day he sinks into the bath to ease the ache where the flying harness has jolted his joints out of line. He dreams about joining the circus.  
  
The days for Jin seem to be passing with frustration at his rag-tag gaggle of backdancers. Kame sat in on the auditions, feeling bad for the kids who walked in with stars in their eyes only to be sent away. The kids Jin had chosen in the end had been the goofy ones that just loved to dance, limbs melting lazily into Jin’s songs. Three of them Kame had never even seen before, and he’s pretty familiar with the juniors.   
  
Jin keeps mailing him about them all day, messages ranging from gentle pride about their achievements to apoplectic rage at their incompetence/misbehaviour/insolence. He has to message Kame rather than disciplining them because the third day of rehearsals he’d yelled at Asou Akira, a 14 year old, who had promptly burst into horrified tears and he hasn’t been able to say a harsh word to them since.   
  
_You’ll make a good dad one day,_ Kame mails, thinking about a small army of children with big dumb eyes and fluffy, wild hair.   
  
_lol i know_ Jin replies, attaching a picture of a beaming 15 year old wearing Jin’s favourite fluoro pink hoodie, which has apparently been regifted.  
  
Kame barely resists setting it as his wallpaper. Every now and then he takes out his phone and just looks at it, stupid smile spreading on his face.  
  
—  
  
  
Jin is nervous before the first Seoul show. He’s always a bit nervous before a show, but it’s somehow worse now, with five anxious little faces sitting around staring at him as if he can be trusted to save them if it all somehow goes horribly wrong. He supposes this is what it must have been like to be Kame in KAT-TUN in the old days.   
  
Everyone is sitting around in their bedazzled leather hoodies. Jin had originally insisted that their costumes were going to be simple and tasteful but then the costume girl had come in with her bedazzler and he’d gotten kind of swept up in the excitement. Now he’s got five glittering juvenile delinquents milling around, giving him a headache whenever their shoulders catch the lights.   
  
His manager Kawamura comes in fifteen minutes before the show starts and runs through the setlist with them, reminding the kids of their cues and asking Jin repeatedly if he remembers all the lyrics.   
  
“Yes,” he says defensively, even though the honest answer is _most of them_.  
  
“Oh,” Kawamura says absently, “By the way, Kamenashi and Taguchi are here.”   
  
“Oh my god,” Mizuki breathes. He’s obsessed with Kame, but he’s also probably the only junior in the whole company who has somehow never managed to speak to him directly. He’d confessed to Jin a week into rehearsals that Kame is his hero and he wants to be just like him when he grows up.   
  
Even though Jin had said, “Why?” he’d still promised him that if he worked hard and behaved himself he’d hook it up when they got back to Tokyo. He figures they’ll take him to karaoke or something. He hasn’t told Kame yet but if Jin knows Kame then he’s not going turn his nose up at an opportunity to play the idolised senpai for an hour or two whether he knows the kid or not.   
  
“Don’t let it throw you,” Jin says, advice which is as necessary for him as it is for the kid. He’d never want to be as lame as Kame when he grows up, but the news that he and Taguchi are here still makes his anxiety skyrocket. He wants them to be proud of him or something. He wants them to think it was worth it.  
  
“Come on,” Jin says, and pulls the kids into a circle to bump fists.   
  
A few times during the first few songs, he tries to peer up through the lights to find their faces, which is foolish because it is both distracting and impossible. From centre stage he can’t see _anybody’s_ faces, just his own repeated on uchiwas a thousand times over. A gently undulating sea.  
  
It’s not until he’s running around the walkway, skittering away from the violently groping hands of his most devoted fans, that he even knows where they are. A small cluster of girls are facing the wrong direction, clutching each other’s arms and shrieking, and there they are, leaning precariously on the flimsy rail that is the only thing protecting them from the ravenous crowd. They are wearing staff t-shirts and carrying uchiwas that are years old; In Taguchi’s Jin is blond and in Kame’s he has mushroom-shaped hair and a stupid look on his face. His stomach turns a bit in embarrassment that explodes into excitement when he draws near and they start waving madly, and he sees Kame’s face, eyes bright and beaming grin.   
  
The fans lose their minds as he draws up to the platform where they’re standing and climbs aboard with a tug of assistance and a hug from Taguchi. When he throws an arm around Kame’s shoulder as he sings, the world goes white with noise. It makes something inside him grind shyly to a halt before picking up full speed, adrenaline rushing to his brain and making him crazy.  
  
That’s the only explanation he has for what happens next; he just wants to hear them scream like that some more, wants to see if they can get louder. Later, he’ll think about how weird and gay and embarrassing it is, but in that moment, it only seems natural to yank Kame against his side and kiss him enthusiastically on the side of the head.   
  
The fans can get louder. Jin jogs down the stairs back to the walkway, leaving chaos in his wake.   
  
—  
  
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—  
  
Kame and Taguchi sit on Jin’s bed and play cards while he showers. They’re all going to take the kids out for Korean BBQ, but Jin has been in the shower forever. They can hear his voice warbling over the running water, singing his own songs.   
  
“He seems happy,” Taguchi says as he lays down his card. The game he’s teaching Kame is complicated and Kame doesn’t really understand what is going on, just that he is losing. He throws down a card angrily. Taguchi wiggles his eyebrows. “He kissed you~”   
  
Kame scoffs, ignoring the slight fluttering of his traitorous heart. He’s decided that he’s angry about it, because if he’s not angry then he’ll just be confused, and he promised himself years ago that he’d never be disoriented by Jin again. “I’d hardly call that a kiss.”   
  
“Did it make you doki-doki?” Taguchi teases, oblivious to his displeasure.   
  
“Don’t be stupid,” Kame says, and leans over and kisses Taguchi sloppily on the cheek. “You know I only have eyes for you, Jun-chan.”   
  
“Sorry to interrupt,” Jin grumbles as he comes out of the bathroom, as if Kame and Taguchi might really have been about to consummate their burning passion for one another. He is bare-chested and his jeans are only half-fasted, wet hair curling floozily around his face. Kame stares resolutely at his cards and not at Jin’s slender, goofy body, his pleasant muscles beneath pale, vulnerable skin.  
  
“Finally,” Kame says as Jin slips a flimsy black t-shirt over his head, collar slipping hazhazardly around his collarbones. “You’re so slow.”   
  
“I was fast,” Jin protests. He jams a cap over his wet hair and fishes his phone out of his pocket, absently reading his email until he gets to one that makes him stop and stare for a minute.   
  
“Oh,” he says after a moment.   
  
“What?” Kame asks. He unfolds himself from the bed and crosses to Jin’s side, taking his wrist to glance at the screen. It’s all in English, but he recognises his own name.  
  
“Um,” Jin says, eyes suddenly darting around uncomfortably. They both just stare back at him expectantly. “It’s from Josh.”  
  
“And?” Kame prods.  
  
“‘Twitter told me that you and Kamenashi made out on stage, lol.” Jin reads. “Did u finally go gay?”  
  
Kame scowls, shoving Jin’s wrist away. “Well, what did you expect to happen? You’re the one that practically molested me.”   
  
“It wasn’t me,” Jin protests. “It was Aquaneesha~”   
  
“Whatever,” Kame says, crossing his arms. He feels his shoulders drawing up, ostentatiously showcasing his irritation. He concentrates on trying to smooth out his taut muscles.   
  
Jin peers at him. “Are you angry?”  
  
His uncertainty is ridiculous; it’s obvious Kame is. Kame counts to ten. He is unwilling to let this escalate into a full-scale incident when he’d dragged Taguchi out of bed at the crack of dawn just to come here, when there is a group of excited juniors waiting for them down the hall, when he doesn’t even really know what part he is angriest about anyway. He shrugs. On the bed, Taguchi is still shuffling the cards, seemingly oblivious to the rising tension.   
  
Jin scratches the back of his head, looking like a sheepish child. “But it made the girls so happy,” he says with a sad little face, as if he can’t understand why Kame is being so mean to him. “Since when are you so uptight about fanservice? You and Koki are usually dry humping all over the place.”  
  
 _It’s different,_ Kame wants to say, but doesn’t.   
  
“It’s fine,” he says instead. “Let’s go.”  
  
—  
  
It’s obviously not fine.   
  
Jin spends most of the night staring holes into Kame’s head, trying to get him to look up and meet Jin’s eye so they can share a moment of understanding and everything will be forgotten and Jin won’t have to feel guilty anymore, but Kame isn’t being forthcoming. He’s lavishing attention on the juniors instead, slowly winding them up in his web like a benevolent spider. He patiently answers Mizuki’s questions, sometimes gently, sometimes frankly with a cheeky smile. Mizuki is spellbound, almost swooning with admiration.   
  
It turns out Taguchi is a huge hit in Korea, too. Girls keep stopping to stare, even though Jin is pretty sure most people here don’t recognise them. They look at Taguchi and giggle behind their hands. Taguchi just grins winningly back at them until they giggle and blush and scurry away.   
  
Jin is not having a good night.  
  
When they get back to the hotel, Kame and Taguchi say goodbye in the elevator and Jin goes up to his room on the 23rd floor alone. He sits around in his hotel robe feeling fancy for a while, drinking from miniature bottles of champagne and watching a documentary about baboons. When the novelty of that wears off, he sulks.   
  
After an hour, before he can think about it too much, he takes the elevator to the 13th floor. He can’t remember their room number, so he accidentally knocks on the wrong door twice before he finally finds them. He bows and apologises profusely to the Korean businessmen who open the door. When he finds them, Taguchi opens the door in a t-shirt and jeans. Kame is lounging on the bed in a towelling robe that matches Jin’s.   
  
“I’m gonna go make a phone call,” Taguchi says, closing the door behind him.   
  
Jin sits down on the bed next to Kame, who is lying on his back, hugging a lumpy pillow to his chest.   
  
“I’m sorry,” Jin says. He sits by Kame’s shoulder at the foot of the bed.   
  
“For what?” Kame asks. He stares at the spots on the ceiling. Jin wants to reach out and force Kame to look at him. He feels weak, but the idea of fighting with Kame again is terrifying.   
  
“You know,” Jin says. “Whatever. Whatever I did to make you angry.”  
  
Kame makes a tired, bemused noise. “I don’t know either,” he says. He rolls on his side, away from Jin, and Jin tugs weakly at his shoulder until he rolls back. He tugs too hard and Kame’s face ends up colliding with Jin’s knee. Kame lies there without moving, nose mashed into Jin’s robe.   
  
“Is the idea of kissing me funny to you?” Kame asks after a minute.  
  
“No,” Jin says. “Well, a bit, maybe.”  
  
“Because it’s disgusting?” Kame asks. His voice is muffled into Jin’s robe and Jin’s heart wrenches painfully, because fuck, fuck, fuck, he can be an insensitive dick sometimes. He never means to hurt anyone. Sometimes he does anyway.   
  
“No,” Jin says, shaking Kame’s shoulder.   
  
“Right,” Kame says, clearly not believing him.   
  
“It’s not,” Jin says, and pushes Kame’s hair out of the way so he can lean down and press his lips dryly against Kame’s temple; he lingers there a moment, feeling the heat radiating from Kame’s skin. Jin has kissed other guy friends, but they always taste like smoke and sweat and burger grease, except Pi, whose skin is perpetually ocean-sprayed. Kame tastes like milky tea and honey. “See?”  
  
“I see,” Kame says, then he’s quiet for a long time, until he finally presses his face into the mattress and grumbles, “Get off me, you stink like booze.”  
  
“I smell like fucking roses,” Jin insists, wrapping his hand around the back of Kame’s head and smooshing his face into the covers, laughing at Kame’s struggles.  
  
—  
  
Jin spends the better part of three days trying to figure out how to get out of Kame’s friend’s stupid art show, but in the end he remembers Kame brushing the lint from Josh’s shoulders and giving him tips on romancing Japanese women, and heroically resigns himself to attendance.  
  
That doesn’t mean he’ll go quietly. He lies flat on his back on his bed loudly complaining (“THEY’RE GOING TO TALK TO ME ABOUT POSTMODERNISM”) while Kame goes through his closet trying to find something for him to wear so that “you don’t look like a hobo and embarrass me.”   
  
In the end it’s not really that bad. One of the artists is a famous fashion photographer by day, so there are a lot of hot women walking around in artistically skimpy clothing and Jin is suddenly glad that he let Kame manhandle him into a designer suit he’d forgotten he even owned. Early in the evening Kame introduces him to a British model called Venice who has long ginger coloured hair and a gap-toothed smile. Jin spends about an hour trying fruitlessly to charm her while Kame weaves through the crowd schmoozing with his seemingly endless cabal of acquaintances, occasionally meeting Jin’s eyes across the room and smiling broadly in a way that he doesn’t smile at any of those posers. A secret smile in front of a room full of people.   
  
After a while, Jin gives up on Venice and wanders listlessly to Kame’s side, awkwardly hovering while Kame listens to some famous art guy talk about Jackson Pollock. When the guy finally walks away to go bore some other poor soul, Kame elbows Jin and says, “You have the worst poker face in the world.”  
  
“I’m inscrutable,” Jin protests, but Kame’s eyes have already drifted across the room and his face goes a bit weird and grey like he’s an overwrought anime character. Jin follows his eyes and sees a huge painting, all bold, thick lines that look stark and sad somehow.   
  
Jin blinks. “That’s you,” he says, staring at the naked back rising up the canvas, the subject’s face just barely turned to the side, facing away. To anyone else, this would be an anonymous figure, shadowy and discreet, but Jin has been looking at this back half his life; always essentially the same no matter how much the body changes, impossibly slim waist swelling up into sturdy shoulders, always slightly curved to one side, hips tilted and spine melting. The painting is too intimate. Jin wants to throw himself in front of it and stop people from looking at it, as if he’s walked into a room and found the walls plastered in stills from Kame’s sex tape. Panic starts eating his stomach up. He can’t stop staring at the muscles that ripple in oils across the canvas. It is a study in obsession. His hackles rise.  
  
Kame’s face is grim. “Hitoshi must be part of this show,” he says, turning abruptly from the canvas.   
  
“Hitoshi?” Jin repeats, voice abnormally squeaky. It takes him a minute to connect the name with the dweeby little ex-boyfriend he met months ago, and the memory sends fresh rage through him. He starts to storm over to the canvas to see it close up; to read the name plate and be outraged all over again at whatever heinous title that scumbag has chosen to give his betrayal.  
  
Kame grabs his wrist to stop him. “Don’t call attention to it,” he says, then, smiling cajolingly, “Don’t worry about it, okay?”  
  
“You can _see your butt_ ,” Jin hisses. “It’s practically _pornography_.”   
  
They stare at each other for a moment. Kame keeps smiling at him gently as if he’s a mental patient, but Jin can see the disquiet beneath the blankness. “It’s not like anyone can tell its me.”   
  
“I can,” Jin says stubbornly. “And you can.”   
  
“Then it’s our secret,” Kame says, squeezing his wrist. A few people are watching them and Jin wonders what this scene looks like. “Just forget about it.”  
  
Jin frowns unhappily but lets Kame drag him over to say hello to the guy that invited him here, whose name Jin still can’t remember. While they talk, Jin tries to nod and laugh in the right places, but his eyes keep drifting over to the canvas, a hot feeling prickling the back of his neck.   
  
Later, he slips away and writes a cheque for the gallery owner, unable to stand the thought of some perverted old collector taking this piece of Kame home, putting him over the fireplace. Standing around with his skeezy friends and gazing at Kame’s naked flesh. It’s different, somehow, to the shop photos and magazines that line the bedroom walls of thirteen year old girls. This is like a piece of Kame sold against his will.   
  
He doesn’t tell Kame. He doesn’t really understand his own actions, but he’s still afraid that Kame would understand them all too well.  
  
—  
  
Hitoshi confronts them by Kame’s car. He’s drunk, tie pulled askew and collar haphazardly unbuttoned, hair messed up in an undignified fashion. At least he looks more interesting than the first time Jin saw him.   
  
He stumbles towards Kame and asks, desperately, “What are you doing here with him?”   
  
Kame frowns. “We’re friends.”  
  
Hitoshi scowls. “You’re with him _all the time_ ,” he cries. “You’re always in the papers.”   
  
Kame winces. Hitoshi stumbles forward a few steps and reaches out. For a minute Jin thinks he’s going to shake Kame. He finds himself surging forward like he’s going to get between them, but Hitoshi just grabs Kame’s hand, clasping it pathetically.   
  
“Please, tell me you’re not with him, Kazuya,” he begs. “I’ll believe you, just promise me.”  
  
Kame opens his mouth to answer but Jin’s mouth is bigger and faster and hostility has been eating him alive ever since he saw that painting of Kame, hanging out there in public for all the world to see.   
  
“So what if he is?” he asks, getting in Hitoshi’s face. He’s got a good four or five inches on the guy and usually he’d feel bad about picking on a little guy, but he’s too furious to think about it. “What business is it of yours?”   
  
“Jin,” Kame says, tugging on his arm. He sounds exasperated. “You’re not helping.”   
  
“I’ll handle this, Kazu,” Jin says imperiously, ignoring the look of disbelief Kame gives him. Hitoshi’s face has gone all red and sweaty. He looks like a giant red balloon about to pop.   
  
“You’re being ridiculous,” Kame says. “Both of you.” He unlocks his car and gets in.   
  
Hitoshi gazes miserably up at Jin. He hisses, “You never even wanted him,” and stomps away. Jin watches him go through the clearing haze of his rage, smiling sheepishly when Kame rolls his eyes and turns the ignition.  
  
“You’re such an idiot,” Kame says. “I don’t need you to do stuff like that.”  
  
“I can’t help it,” Jin replies, eyes on the strange lines of Kame’s face. The rolling lights outside cast neon patterns on his skin as they pull out of the lot. “I don’t understand what you saw in that guy.”  
  
“He wasn’t always like that,” Kame says, with a wistfulness that ties Jin up in knots. “Just towards the end.”   
  
Jin wants to ask how it happened. There’s still so much that happened to Kame in the time they were apart that he doesn’t know, huge pieces of Kame that he doesn’t understand. He’d once been the premier Kamenashi Kazuya historical scholar, so it seems wrong now that Jin isnt familiar with the details of the breakdown of his relationship with Hitoshi, or that there are former lovers out there whose names Jin doesn’t even know.   
  
“He seems like a total dick,” Jin says, instead of all the things he really wants to say.  
  
—  
  
“I haven’t ever,” Jin slurs, as if they had been in the middle of a conversation and not watching a shitty game show in comfortable silence ever since Jin had drunkenly knocked down Kame’s door at about 2am. “Not ever. That’s lame, right?”   
  
“Haven’t ever what?” Kame asks, attention still half on the screen where a contestant is trying to run through a huge vat of tofu to catch a mechanical greyhound.   
  
Jin turns to him gracelessly, arm balanced on the back of the couch by Kame’s shoulder. He keeps shifting closer to Kame until his knees are rammed up against Kame’s thigh.  
  
“Kissed a guy,” he says. He is staring at Kame’s face quizzically, as if trying to read a language that he doesn’t understand. “What’s good about it?”  
  
Alarm keeps rolling Kame’s stomach over. “I don’t know,” he says, leaning as far back on the couch as he can, trying to wrench himself out of Jin’s personal bubble. “It’s the same as kissing a girl, more or less.”  
  
“You like it better, though,” Jin says, almost a question except by now he’s breathing onto Kame’s skin, his lips almost brushing Kame’s cheek. So close and getting closer, and the panic in Kame’s stomach explodes in a cold sweat down his spine. “Show me,” Jin murmurs, and for a minute Kame is paralysed with equal parts terror and lust, but self preservation wins out as Jin’s bottom lip drags wetly against his cheek. He puts his hands on Jin’s shoulders and pushes him away firmly.  
  
“Cut it out.” He’s panting and he can feel that his face must be flushed red and blotchy, and Jin just sits there staring as if he doesn’t understand how Kame can do this to him. Kame glares at him. “I won’t be your bicurious experiment.”   
  
Jin throws himself drunkenly back on the couch, arms crossed and pouting. “You’re so stingy.” He mutinously kicks over an empty water bottle on the coffee table. “I bet there are loads of guys who want to make out with me.”   
  
“I bet there are,” Kame says, looking back at the tv, heart still beating hummingbird-fast. He can’t look at Jin and see the flush in his cheeks or the luxurious swell of his lips. He stares at the tofu guy until he hears the sound of Jin’s snoring and he’s safe and horny and alone.


	5. Part Five

Toward the end of September, Kame and Pi arrange a trip up to the beach house of a mutual acquaintance when they both happen to have three days off at the same time. Jin is brought along like a small child. He is woken very early one morning and bundled sleepily into the backseat of Pi’s SUV with a juice box and Kame’s PSP. Josh is already sitting in the front seat, looking bleary eyed and a bit confused. Later, Kame tells Jin that they brought him along just to keep Jin occupied.  
  
Kame sits in the back seat with Jin, drinking coffee and reading the paper. Jin keeps slumping more and more until he’s curled up across the seats with his face pressed into Kame’s thigh, hidden beneath Kame’s broadsheets. Whenever Kame carefully turns the page the thin paper rustles against Jin’s hair, so he swats at it irritably until Kame folds it and puts it away. After that he sits with his arm draped over Jin’s shoulder, fingers occasionally pleasantly brushing the shell of Jin’s ear. At first, Jin pretends to be asleep. Then he really sleeps.   
  
He wakes to the slamming of car doors and bolts upright, gazing around in bewilderment. He is alone in the car but when he looks out the back window, he sees Kame and Pi lifting their surfboards from the roof racks. Josh is smoking and squinting up into the sun.   
  
Jin yawns expansively, stumbling from the backseat and standing, for a minute, on legs that feel like jelly. He bums Josh’s smoke and watches as Kame wipes down the dust from his surfboard, talking to Pi and laughing. His skin burns golden in the sun.   
  
“What time is it?” Jin asks.   
  
“11,” Josh says. “Dude, you slept forever.”   
  
Jin has a confused impression of dreams about icecream and cities full of puppies and waking occasionally to the feel of a gentle hand in his hair. “I was really sleepy…”   
  
“Fucking lazy ass,” Josh chides, taking his cigarette back and sucking out the last drag before stamping it out beneath his sandalled toe.   
  
“Shut up,” Jin says absently, distracted by the flex of Kame’s muscles as he lifts the surfboard over his head and carries it over to them. He remembers a time when he could wrap one hand almost all the way around Kame’s bicep. Right now he is actually bigger than Pi. Still smaller than Jin, though. Sort of.   
  
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Kame says in an annoying sing song voice as he pulls the keys out of the pocket of his cut-off jeans and jangles them. The shorts are frayed around his knobbly knees, one of which still has a bandaid on the injury sustained when Jin accidentally tripped him the other day. Jin swats his hand away when Kame reaches out to ruffle his hair.   
  
Kame laughs and throws him the keys. “Pi and I are gonna head into the surf,” he says. “Let yourselves in. You guys take the front room. Pi and I are gonna share the back.”  
  
Jin frowns, wondering who decided this. “You haven’t even taken your bags in.”   
  
Kame grins. “That’s what we brought Josh for,” he says, waving as he picks up his board and jogs back to Pi’s side. They disappear out the front gate and onto the beach, all happy and laughy and annoying.   
  
The front room looks like it belongs to a ten year old boy, with bunk beds and walls covered in posters from some sports anime Jin doesn’t recognise. Not only does he not recognise the anime, he doesn’t even recognise the sport, but the creepy kid in the centre of all of them is holding a weird red ball. Jin dumps his backpack on the bottom bunk. Josh sighs as he takes the top.  
  
Jin goes back out for Kame’s Louis Vuitton overnight bag, scowling as he takes it into the room in the back and finds a master bedroom replete with a plush looking king sized bed and an ensuite bathroom with a gigantic spa. He doesn’t understand why he has to share the kiddy room with stupid Josh who farts and snores in his sleep and Pi gets to share the honeymoon suite with Kame, who lies still and quiet and never makes the bed too hot.   
  
He spends most of the day sitting on the beach watching them surf and scribbling lyrics in his notebook while Josh wanders around the town with his little handheld movie camera, making some boring documentary for his friends back home. Every now and then Kame or Pi will come in close to the shore and wave at him enthusiastically, trying to coax him into the choppy waves, until Jin eventually rolls up his jeans and wanders in until the water licks around his knees. Kame paddles back into the shallows and floats in circles around him, occasionally splashing him with water and laughing at his shrieks, until Jin reaches out and shoves him off the board and Kame plunges spluttering into the sea. He emerges seconds later, whipping his hair off his face with the kind of exaggerated fabulousness he usually reserves for dramas.   
  
“Dick,” he complains, but then his face splits into a dazzlingly wide grin and he blindsides Jin with a wet, salty hug.  
  
—  
  
Jin helps Kame do the grocery shopping so he can make curry for dinner. They get carried away and end up with enough food for about thirty people; fat fillets of pork and fresh shrimp, a slab of European beer and a few bottles of wine, an expensive melon, about half a kilo of olives, a sad-looking bag of pastries for breakfast, pre-prepared karaage, fruit, vegetables, potato chips, and a frilly pink-frosted birthday cake from the display case by the cash register. The cashier, a geriatric old lady with thick glasses and frizzy white hair, asks whose birthday it is. Jin tells her it is Kame’s and she gives them free taiyaki to eat on the short walk home.  
  
Pi helps Kame cook their dinner. Josh tries to help at first too, but Kame keeps watching his movements like one of the insane megalomaniacal chefs from a movie and he eventually gives up, throwing down his onion in frustration and stomping over to sit at the breakfast bar with Jin.   
  
“Kame _nazi,_ ” he hisses under his breath, face going blank and innocent when Kame shoots him a dirty glare.   
  
When Josh is no longer butchering Kame’s vegetables, the collective mood lifts. Pi starts singing along to the radio and Kame joins in, their warbling so far off key that Jin finds it difficult to believe they have sold a few million records between them. Josh hums along even though he only knows half the words, but Jin is quiet, pushing the lid of his beer bottle around the bench. He stares at Kame with his salty hair tied up and his skin still streaked with sand in odd places, around his elbows and knees and ears. His movements are clean and efficient as he chops the apples and drops them into the bubbling pot, even as Pi dances obnoxiously around him, bumping their hips together. He dissolves in giggles but doesn’t stop slicing. He’s so beautiful it makes Jin sick.   
  
A realisation is slowly dawning.  
  
—  
  
They eat sitting around the coffee table, hunched over obscenely gigantic bowls of curry. Kame made it insanely spicy the way Jin likes it. Josh’s face is all red and sweaty and he keeps snuffling, scowling when Jin laughs at him. Jin eats two servings and Josh’s leftovers, then collapses, bloated with happiness. He’s too lazy to get up and get more beer, so he starts drinking Kame’s wine, complaining loudly about the taste.  
  
Across the table, Kame is flushed and glassy eyed, though Jin isn’t sure if it is from the wine or the lava-like curry. His feet occasionally nudge Jin’s leg beneath the table, until Jin traps one with his knee. Kame’s toes wriggle against his kneecap, but he doesn’t pull it away.  
  
Somehow, the conversation has turned to Kame’s love life. Josh has been grilling him about whether he’s ever slept with anyone scandalous, and seems disappointed by the results. Jin doesn’t really join in the conversation, but he doesn’t help change the subject, either. He’s been kind of curious but reluctant to bring up the conversation himself; when Josh starts listing specific people that he thinks Kame might have seduced, Jin just peers across the table expectantly.   
  
After Kame denies sleeping with about a dozen different Johnny’s, rockstars, and TV personalities, he starts laughing and says, “Seriously, I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that I’m out cruising for famous conquests all the time. My love life is nowhere near this interesting.”  
  
“Gay dudes fuck around a lot,” Josh insists, clutching his beer. “I’ve seen Queer As Folk. I know what goes on.”  
  
“Those guys don’t have to worry about turning up in _Friday_ ,” Kame rolls his eyes. “I don’t sleep around. It’s too dangerous.”  
  
“Booooooorrrrrrring,” Josh says, but Jin is sort of relieved. He doesn’t think he’d be able to cope if he heard that Kame had slept with some guy in a band and then he had to go and sit next to him on a music show and act like everything is normal.   
  
“I think it’s sensible,” Jin says, clutching his red wine tightly. “And wise. No-one is going to buy the cow if you give away the milk for free.”  
  
Kame sighs and rests his chin on his knees. “It’s been a long time since anyone good even offered to buy the cow…” he whines.   
  
Pi slings his arm around Kame’s neck. “I’ll buy your cow,” he offers graciously.   
  
Kame wrinkles his nose. “Preferably someone who isn’t… you know… heterosexual.”  
  
“Someone who wants to drink his milk,” Josh says, laughing at his own disgusting joke.   
  
Jin bristles, scandalised, whining, “That’s gross.”  
  
“He can’t just let anyone drink his milk,” Pi says, his hand on the back of Kame’s head. “He’s a very handsome young man.”  
  
“NO-ONE IS DRINKING KAME’S MILK,” Jin says angrily.   
  
“We know,” Josh replies with an obnoxious little smirk. “Isn’t that the problem?”  
  
“Can we please stop talking about my milk,” Kame says dryly.   
  
“Stop sexually harassing him,” Jin insists.   
  
“We’re just trying to help our poor lonely single friend,” Pi says.  
  
“You’re single too!” Jin exclaims.  
  
“I’m not lonely, though,” Pi says. “I got milkmaids all over town.”   
  
“This is a really disgusting analogy,” Kame says with a screwed up face.   
  
“What happened to that artist guy?” Pi asks, and Jin wonders if Pi knows about all the boyfriends Jin doesn’t or if he just happened to run into Kame with Hitoshi somewhere; Jin had been under the impression that Kame and Pi don’t talk that much, but sometimes Pi pulls out random facts that make it seem like maybe they do.   
  
“Same as always,” Kame says, drawing his one knee up to his chest and playing with the loose threads on his cut off jeans. “All my relationships end the same way.”   
  
He sounds sad, which is devastating after seeing his radiant smile earlier. Jin pours another half glass of red wine and pushes it towards Kame, who picks it up and dangles it between his stumpy fingers.  
  
“They found out you blew Matsumoto Jun backstage at Music Station?” Josh asks hopefully.  
  
Kame rolls his eyes. His voice lifts a little, mimicking a whining lover. “Kazuya, I just don’t think you’re as invested in this as I am.” He scoffs and sips his wine. “They always expect too much from me.” He screws up his nose. “I think I’m a shitty boyfriend.”  
  
Under the table, Jin wraps his hand around Kame’s foot, running his thumb over his ankle. Kame doesn’t acknowledge the contact.  
  
“I’m a horrible boyfriend too,” Pi agrees.  
  
“I’m an awesome boyfriend,” Jin says, stuffing olives in his mouth as he talks.  
  
“Yeah,” Josh says. “But you have the world’s worst taste in women.”   
  
“Fuck off,” Jin replies indignantly. “They’re not all bad.”  
  
“Uehara-san is nice,” Kame says quietly. Jin wonders when Kame met Takako; if they talked about him. He probably wasn’t such an awesome boyfriend to her. He’d been younger then.  
  
“They’re mostly nice,” Pi explains to Kame. “They’re just not usually into him at all. He follows them around like a little puppy and they end up totally blowing him off.”   
  
“They do not,” Jin says angrily. He crosses his arms. “It’s not me, it’s them.”  
  
“Uh huh,” Josh hums, clearly already growing bored with the conversation.   
  
“They just have to be single right now,” Jin quotes. “Because they’re still growing as individuals.”   
  
“Blah, blah, blah,” Pi drones. “Can we eat that cake already?”   
  
“Yeah,” Kame says, levering himself off the floor. He disappears into the kitchen while Josh starts talking about gay sex again. He’s kind of obsessed with the subject. Jin listens with one ear; the other is fixated on the kitchen, where he can hear Kame opening and closing drawers. He wonders what he’s doing.  
  
“Like, Petey told me that in the states he gets laid every day, sometimes,” Josh is saying. “Being into dudes is awesome.”  
  
The lights go out and Jin cranes his head to see Kame coming back into the room, face aglow in the light of a dozen mismatched birthday candles. He settles the cake in the middle of the coffee table amongst the scattered debris of their dinner. They all stare at it and then Kame says to Jin, “Aren’t you going to blow out the candles?”  
  
“It’s not my birthday,” Jin says. “You do it.”   
  
“Let’s all do it together,” Kame says. They all blow out the candles while Kame hums happy birthday. He cuts huge slices and they eat them in the dim blue light of the moon filtering through the windows. Pi gets more beer. For a while they’re so quiet that Jin can hear the gentle roar of the ocean outside, and then Josh starts talking about Pete’s sex life again.   
  
“He told me I should try it but I was like, no way, man.” He shoves a giant spoonful of cake into his mouth. A bit of strawberry frosting sticks to his upper lip. “I’ve never even kissed a guy.”   
  
“I have,” Pi says.   
  
“What?” Jin sits up straight, staring at him. Pi is sprawled out lazily, his red t-shirt rumpled and slightly torn at the hem. Jin finds it hard to imagine him sidling up to a guy and kissing him, pressing himself into a muscular body and holding tight. “When?”  
  
Pi’s eyes slide askance and meet Kame’s in a way that makes the hair on the back of Jin’s neck stand on end. He lifts his beer bottle and clinks necks with Kame’s.   
  
“Thanks for taking care of me,” he says, and Jin’s heart grinds to a halt.  
  
He stuffs the rest of the cake in his mouth. It tastes like poison.  
  
—  
  
Jin ends up in the top bunk because Josh got too drunk to climb up there. Thankfully, Josh doesn’t talk about gay sex in his sleep, but he does snuffle and snore gently. Every time he rolls over, Jin’s bed moves. Jin irritably tosses from side to side.  
  
He has been lying awake for hours. He keeps thinking about Kame and Pi in the room down the hall. He wonders, irrationally, what they are doing. His brain supplies images he doesn’t want to seriously consider; Pi spooned up against Kame’s back, naked skin rippling together, Kame’s soft, raspy sigh. He wonders if that’s why they chose the master room.  
  
At 3:17AM, he climbs angrily out of the top bunk, stomping on Josh’s wrist in the process. Josh whines in his sleep and draws his fist protectively to his chest, burrowing into the blankets. Jin stumbles into the kitchen in his sweats and old Wu Tang t-shirt, purposely making a lot of nose because he’s hoping to wake up Kame and Pi. If they’re asleep and not doing weird things in the dark.  
  
Kame is already sitting at the kitchen bench, though. He’s wearing a soft-looking grey t-shirt and a mustard-coloured scarf, reading a magazine with his hands wrapped around a mug of tea.   
  
“Shh,” he hisses as Jin stomps through the door. “You’ll wake the others.”  
  
“Why are you awake?” Jin asks suspiciously.   
  
“Pi snores,” Kame says, turning the page. “I can’t sleep.”  
  
“Why don’t you go in there and shut him up with your tongue down his throat?” Jin asks before he can stop himself. His face is hot so he crosses to the fridge and pulls out a bottle of water.   
  
Kame is staring at him with one infuriatingly lifted eyebrow, page paused mid-turn. “Huh?”  
  
“Nothing,” Jin says. He leans against the sink, tearing at the label of his water.  
  
Kame scowls. “You’ve obviously got something to say.”  
  
“You kissed Pi.” Jin feels embarrassingly juvenile and lame, but the knowledge is sitting on his stomach like bad fast food, clogging his arteries and straining his breath.   
  
“It was just once,” Kame says, finally turning the page. He smoothes his hand over it until it lies flat and glossy. “We were drunk and he was curious.”  
  
“I thought you said you wouldn’t be an experiment,” Jin says, his outrage at the injustice finally outweighing his embarrassment.   
  
“I didn’t think you remembered that,” Kame says.   
  
Jin shrugs, scuffing his bare foot along a floorboard.  
  
“I said I wouldn’t be your experiment,” Kame points out reasonably. His voice drops an octave in a way that makes Jin want to stamp his feet with fury. “I’ll be Pi’s experiment any time he wants.”  
  
 _Stop_ , Jin wants to say, but instead he whines, “What’s so good about Pi?”  
  
“He’s so hot,” Kame says. “Like a charming prince. As long as he doesn’t talk.”  
  
 _STOP_. Jin thinks.  
  
“He’s got a fat face and stupid eyes,” Jin says. “I’m way hotter than he is.”  
  
“I also didn’t spend the better part of my adolescence trying to get over my self-destructively unrequited feelings for him,” Kame says. He doesn’t look at Jin, just keeps turning the pages of his magazine as if he’s reading them when he clearly is not. “I’m not putting myself through that again.”  
  
“It would just have been a kiss,” Jin says.  
  
“Right,” Kame says. Jin doesn’t know why he’s pushing this when he should just go to bed and leave Kame be. “When I lost you the first time it just about killed me. In all seriousness. And I’m stronger now but–“ He breaks off, swiping his hand across his face. “I don’t think I’ll ever be self-actualised enough to take that on the chin.”   
  
He pushes his stool away from the bench and stands up. “So just drop it, would you?” He starts to leave the kitchen.  
  
Jin crosses the floor and grabs Kame’s arm and says, “I’m sorry.”   
  
“I know,” Kame murmurs. They just stand there with Jin’s hand still wrapped around Kame’s wrist and then Kame stretches to press his warm lips to the curve of Jin’s cheek. “You’re my best friend, idiot.”   
  
“Mine, too,” Jin stutters after a minute. “You’re mine too.” He shakes Kame’s arm. “I won’t try to make out with you again.”  
  
“Thanks,” Kame says dryly. “I appreciate that.”  
  
—  
  
Kame is busy finishing up Dream Boys and filming special material for Going, so he barely sees Jin for weeks at a time. He thinks that is probably good, because lately Jin keeps doing things that confuse him and he needs to get his head together.   
  
Jin doesn’t have much to do right now. He seems to spend the first few hours of the day laying around on his computer and leaving links to stupid youtube videos on Caoimhe’s wall. Kame watches them on his iPad in the van as he’s shuttled between jobs. They all have titles like _Surprised Kitty_ , _Polar Bear vs Walrus_ , or _The Biggest Snake in the World_. If they’re really cute he clicks the little thumbs up button to like them. When they’re really gross he forwards the links to Nakamaru. Jin gets really angry because he only ever ‘likes’ things and doesn’t type actual replies, but he’s too lazy to painstakingly type things out on the iPad so he just ‘likes’ Jin’s angry comments, too.   
  
When he doesn’t have to see him face to face, it’s easier to remember that Jin is straight and totally not into Kame in the way that Kame is into him. Even if the way that he looks at Kame sometimes implies otherwise. Even if he has psycho little jealous fits when he finds out Kame kissed someone else, or gets angry that Kame refuses to be the first guy to kiss him. Even if his fingers sometimes linger on Kame’s elbow or wrist when they should automatically fall away. He’s not available to Kame in the way that Kame wants him.  
  
This isn’t new information. Kame’s had years to come to terms with it, and mostly he has. It’s just sometimes, when he’s alone and tired he looks bleakly into the future and wonders if it is possible that he could ever love somebody as much or even more than he already loves Jin.  
  
It seems impossible. Sometimes when he gets home late at night he sits on his balcony and makes wishes on the faint Tokyo stars that he will meet someone who can make him forget how much he wants Jin. A nice guy who likes kids, with warm eyes and good hair. A guy who will love him back.   
  
The weak twinkling of the stars fades, and Kame is left sitting in the morning light, still hopelessly in love with Jin.  
  
—  
  
When Kame meets Naoki, the Giants’ new shortstop, he wonders if the stars are listening after all. Maybe. It’s not like he’s struck senseless by love at first sight, but when Naoki awkwardly catches up with him in the parking lot as he’s about to get into his manager’s van and shyly asks if he’d like to get a drink and maybe some dinner some time, Kame is charmed enough to say yes.   
  
Naoki is a little over six feet tall and has formidable shoulders and a silly grin. When he gets his phone out to enter Kame’s number into his contacts, a jewel-encrusted Miffy phone charm swings free. Kame bites his lip, trying not to laugh because the poor guy is already fumbling a bit, looking like he still can’t quite believe he asked Kame out, let alone that Kame said yes.   
  
He touches Naoki’s elbow as he says, “See you soon, then,” smiling in the shy way he has perfected after years on Shounen Club.   
  
Naoki stutters as he says, “See you,” then grins so wide that Kame’s own smile, his real smile, breaks out honest and genuine.   
  
Kame hums under his breath the whole ride home.  
  
—  
  
When Kame tells Jin that he has lined up a Tuesday night date with some baseball guy in a trendy Italian restaurant, Jin does not know what to do with this information. His mouth opens and closes uselessly like a mute.   
  
“But what about—“ he bites the words off. He’d been about to say, _but what about me?_ , which frightens him. This is the first time even he has seen Kame in like a month, and now some guy just waltzes in and thinks he can take Kame’s first free evening like it’s nothing, like there aren’t a billion people lining up and waiting patiently for just a moment of Kame’s time? Jin thought they were going to hang out and watch the new episode of _Fringe_ tonight before Jin went out, and now Kame is abandoning him at a moment’s notice.   
  
Kame turns from the wardrobe, where he is going through his collection of totally identical jeans to figure out which pair of ripped stonewash jeans are the right pair to sweep this guy off his feet. As if it matters.   
  
“Huh?” he asks.   
  
“Nothing,” Jin says, reminding himself not to be a selfish dick. Kame looks pretty happy about this. He must like the guy. Jin takes out his phone and opens the browser. “What’s this guy’s name again?”  
  
Kame turns back to the wardrobe, finally selecting a pair of jeans. He lays them carefully on the bed next to where Jin is sitting. “Saito Naoki,” he says. “He just transferred from the Marines.”   
  
Jin types the name into google and a bunch of images of a smiling guy with a shaved head come up. Jin stares at them, trying to picture this guy standing with Kame, greeting him when he gets home late at night. With a kiss on the cheek, maybe. A hug.   
  
He scrolls down the page and hits a cache of half naked photos of this guy promoting a trendy underwear label, all gleaming muscles and rock hard abs. Reflexively, Jin touches his stomach and feels the softness there.   
  
“He’s okay, I guess,” Jin says, angrily closing the browser. Kame lays a white t-shirt down on top of the jeans and pulls a pair of checked flannel shirts out of the closet, eyeing them critically. Jin likes the red one better because the blue one makes Kame look puffy. He shoves his phone in his pocket and says, “The blue one.”  
  
Kame makes a face and puts the blue one back in the closet. He hangs the red one on the doorknob and pulls a flouncy black scarf from the closet, draping it over the shoulders.   
  
He starts pulling his jewellery off. “What are you doing tonight?”   
  
Jin flops onto his back on Kame’s bed, staring up at the tasteful light fittings. “Well we were _supposed_ to be watching _Fringe._ ”  
  
“Sorry,” Kame says, pulling his sweater over his head and discarding it, not really sounding all that regretful. “Can’t you watch it with Josh?”  
  
“He’s stupid,” Jin says. “I’ll wait and watch it with you.”  
  
“Okay,” Kame says. He stops and stares down at Jin for a moment, looking dishevelled in his white wife beater and faded jeans. “What’s Kusano doing?”  
  
Jin shrugs. “I’m tired,” he says. “I think I’ll just go home and go to bed.”  
  
He does. He tells Kusano he’s not feeling well when he calls to ask him out, then turns off his phone so he doesn’t have to explain himself anymore. The truth is he really does feel sick. He lays in bed with his face buried in the pillow, still wearing all his clothes, and tries not to think about Kame sitting at a secluded table with that beefcake; tries not to think about why it upsets him so much.  
  
He spends an hour telling himself that he’s just jealous because he doesn’t have a girl right now, but then he remembers Kame’s delighted, excited smile as he’d waved goodbye when Jin dropped him at the restaurant earlier, and it’s like a smack in the face. He clutches his stomach and curls in on himself and thinks, fully articulated for the first time, _Am I gay for Kame?_  
  
He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling for a while, weighing up the evidence. Intense jealousy over his love interests, check. Insane need to know his whereabouts at every moment of the day, check. Bizarre fixation on his smile and the way his eyes sparkle in the sun, check. Inappropriate desire to snuggle into his lap on long car trips, check. Drunken attempts to casually initiate a make out session, check. Shit.  
  
Jin is an idiot.  
  
He closes his eyes and lays his hand over his heart, testing himself. He thinks of Kame at concerts, his lewd facial expressions and slutty dancing, and feels relief when there is no response. Then, unbidden, he remembers Kame singing and laughing and dancing around the kitchen with Pi and his heart goes nuts.   
  
“Oh, god,” he groans. “Oh, god.”   
  
Panicking, he pulls the covers over his head and curls into a ball in the centre of the bed, mind racing as fast as his heartbeat. He’s so stupid. Kame waits around for him forever and it takes him all this time to even consider the very obvious possibility that he might like Kame back. And now Kame is out on a date with a future member of the baseball hall of fame. Jin doesn’t know how the hell he’s supposed to compete with that. He doesn’t even know how to pitch a baseball. Honestly he doesn’t even know what a shortstop does, just that Kame seemed really excited about it.   
  
“Kame,” he whines into his fist, imagining Kame’s eyes sparkling across the table and the way he might wedge his foot between Saito’s. The way he’ll flirt with him and maybe let him come up and stay the night, if Saito drives him home. If he plays his cards right.   
  
Jin hopes Saito is a really lousy date.  
  
—  
  
It’s a good date. Naoki is charming in a kind of befuddled, easily embarrassed way that is delightful for Kame, who really enjoys embarrassing people. Whenever he talks through his eyelashes or pitches his voice in a certain way Naoki’s cheeks flush bright red and he gropes desperately for his water glass. It’s a bit like dating a really hot version of Nakamaru. Except in certain moments he can be disarmingly smooth, like when he reaches out and strokes a finger along the inside of Kame’s wrist when they’re having a conversation about his fastball.   
  
Kame has his undivided attention. He’d like to return it, except he keeps getting inconsequential emails from Jin and even after he stops reading them he keeps feeling his phone buzzing in his pocket, reminding him that Jin is out there somewhere begging for his attention.   
  
When Naoki excuses himself to the men’s room, Kame pulls his phone out and skims through Jin’s emails – they’re all about some new album Jin is listening to, or the crappy pizza he had delivered for dinner – before he replies, _What the hell are you doing, I’m on a date!_  
  
It is barely ten seconds before Jin replies, as if he has been clutching his phone in preparation for Kame’s reply.   
  
_don’t abandon ur friends just bc ur in a relationship now_ it says.  
  
Kame blinks down at it and then hastily shoves the phone back into his pocket, resolving to find out what the hell Jin’s problem is later. Naoki slides back into his seat and says, “Is everything alright?”  
  
Kame shakes the memory off and leans his chin on his hand, smiling as he says, “I was lonely here by myself.”  
  
Naoki flushes red and Kame finds himself grinning with delight.   
  
Later, Naoki drives him home and Kame is kind of relieved when he says that he’s got training early in the morning and can’t come up for the coffee Kame offers. It really was a good date and Kame wants to see him again, but Jin’s bizarre email keeps coming back to him and he’s worried his preoccupation will show when they’re alone together.  
  
In the safety of the car with its dark-tinted windows, Kame leans in and kisses him, tasting, with some displeasure, the tomato and basil sauce that had accompanied his spaghetti. Other than that, Naoki is a good kisser; his hands are large and reassuring where they wrap warmly over Kame’s biceps, and he doesn’t push too much or try to treat Kame like he’s a girl.  
  
Kame waves from the footpath as he drives away. He’s already fishing his phone out of his pocket as he rides the elevator up to his floor and steps out, ready to call Jin and coax him out of whatever gloomy mood he has fallen into.   
  
He doesn’t have to, though. There’s a hooded figure slumped against his door, easily recognisable even in the miles of fleecy grey fabric. Alarm spears through him and he hastily crosses the hall, relieved when Jin sees him and stumbles to his feet.   
  
“Hey,” Jin says, scratching the back of his head. “How was it?”  
  
“Fine,” Kame frowns. “What’s wrong?”  
  
Jin makes a face. “Nothing,” he says. “I just thought I’d drop by. See how it went. You’re out late, it must have been good.”  
  
It’s only 11PM. Kame unlocks his door and ushers Jin inside, looking around, hoping that none of his neighbours had seen the hobo camped outside his door. “It was good,” Kame says. Jin is already punching in the security code for the alarm. “He’s nice.”   
  
“Good,” Jin says, “That’s good,” but he’s still wearing his hood and his eyes are downcast and he doesn’t look like he thinks it is good at all.  
  
“What’s going on?” Kame asks. “You’re being weird.”  
  
Jin makes this weird screeching, yelling noise of pure frustration, turning around and scrubbing his hands over his face. He flees into Kame’s kitchen and pours himself a glass of water, drinking the whole tumbler in one gulp. His distress makes the air around them crackle and pop. Kame reaches out and grabs his shoulders, says, “Jin, what is it?”   
  
Jin says, “I think…”, reaches out blindly, grabs Kame’s hands, and kisses him clumsily on the mouth. For a minute, it’s timid and disjointed, overwhelmed by Jin’s obvious terror, but then he slides his hands up into Kame’s hair and kisses him properly, lips sliding mint-flavoured and butter-soft over Kame’s own.   
  
If the kiss with Naoki earlier was good, then kissing Jin is like a religious experience; he’d longed for this for so long that he’d almost convinced himself that it would be a total anti-climax if it ever happened. It’s not, though. It’s like standing in Tokyo Dome for the first time and hearing the crowd scream his name. He’s worried that when Jin lets him go he might spontaneously combust, his heart growing, five, ten, a million sizes until he just explodes.  
  
“What?” he gasps in the space between their kisses. He pulls the hood off Jin’s head, sliding his hand up the back of his neck and into the luxurious, impossible curls. The other settles on the waist of Jin’s hoodie, pulling the fabric tight across Jin’s back.  
  
Jin rests his forehead against Kame’s, eyes closed. His hands are still in Kame’s hair, holding him in place. Keeping him close.   
  
“I think you were wrong,” Jin says.   
  
Kame twists the fist at Jin’s side. “About?”   
  
“My feelings.” Jin nuzzles his face into Kame’s temple. “For you…”   
  
Kame will never admit it, but in that moment, he has to kiss Jin again just to stop himself from turning into a blubbering mess.  
  
—  
  
Jin wakes early the next morning. For once, he’s alone in his bed; Kusano sometimes comes back and crashes at Jin’s even if Jin doesn’t go out with him, but he must have picked up a girl or something because Jin is all alone in the whole apartment. It’s a rare experience, but he’s glad because it means he doesn’t have to face anyone right away and explain the bright red hickeys that he finds on his neck, or the dumb, lovestruck look that seems to have permanently imprinted itself on his face. He hums as he showers and draws little hearts on the condensation on the glass. It’s nice to have some privacy to act like a total girl for a while.  
  
They’d spent about an hour making out pressed up against Kame’s fridge before Kame had gently pushed him away with both hands on his chest, smoothed his hands through his hair, and told him he had to go home. Jin had been momentarily offended, but then he’d looked at the desperate, needy look in Kame’s eyes and he’d understood. There was a promise in Kame’s there that Jin was not at all ready to let him deliver. It’s exciting, though, the idea that Kame is all riled up for him. That when Jin is ready, Kame will be there. Waiting with that look in his eyes.   
  
Ages ago, Josh instituted a 24 hour rule for Jin after he meets girls. He has to wait at least that long before he mails them, otherwise they’ll think he’s a desperate loser and won’t want to sleep with him. He’s pretty sure the rule doesn’t apply to Kame, but he hesitates before contacting him anyway, unsure of what exactly last night meant for them. Is Kame his boyfriend now? Is Kame still going to go out with that baseball guy again? Does Kame know he’s serious about this?   
  
He composes a series of increasingly lame messages to Kame, discarding them miserably because he doesn’t sound cool or smooth at all. That baseball guy probably writes suave emails about how beautiful and precious Kame is, but thinking like that still makes Jin squirm with embarrassment, even if it is true. He doesn’t know how to transition from being Kame’s on-and-off bff to being the guy that feasibly wants to get in his pants in the not-too-distant future. Is he supposed to be different?   
  
In the end, he decides to wait it out and let Kame set the tone. Kame has always been the one to reach out and show him the path when he would otherwise charge clumsily forward and end up in a mess. Once Kame emails him, he’ll know how to respond.  
  
He waits for hours. The mail never comes.  
  
—  
  
He tortures himself for almost 30 hours. He hasn’t exactly told anyone about his sudden revelation about Kame, and it seems like it might jinx an outcome that is already looking pretty shaky, if Kame’s total lack of communication is anything to go by. There’s nobody to whine to or help him analyse Kame’s actions; Josh notices he’s being weird, but just keeps telling him to quit moping around and be a man, which is hardly helpful. Josh probably thinks he’s met some girl and he’s being shifty about it. A few times, Jin almost blurts out, _I MADE OUT WITH KAME AND HE NEVER CALLED ME_ , but he stops himself just in time.  
  
He starts to wonder if Kame decided that Saito was the way to go after all. It’s not like Kame to be fickle, but Jin did kind of dick him around and Saito is built like a Greek god. He spends a few miserable hours running Saito’s name through Google again and learning everything there is to know about him, until Josh finally snaps and turns the router off at the wall because Jin’s supposed to be helping him with a new song for Hey Say Jump.  
  
Finally, he snaps and calls Kame from his bathroom, hoping that Josh’s music is loud enough to drown out the call.   
  
“Why are you doing this to me?” he whines the second Kame answers the phone.  
  
A pause, and then Kame says coolly, in marked contrast to his warm farewell from the other day, “Doing what?”  
  
“Why haven’t you called me?” Jin sits on the lid of the toilet with his arm wrapped around his waist.   
  
Another beat, and then Kame says, “Hold on a minute,” and Jin hears the muffled sounds of him excusing himself and retreating to some place quiet. “Why haven’t _you_ called _me?_ ” He sounds really annoyed. “You’re the one that suddenly decided he was a little bit gay out of nowhere. When you didn’t call I assumed you’d changed your mind.”   
  
Jin winces.   
  
Kame continues, “I was trying to give you some space.”  
  
“I don’t want space,” Jin blurts, horrified. “I didn’t change my mind!” He clutches the strings of his hoodie so tight that the hood starts to bunch painfully behind his neck. “I just didn’t– I don’t know, you’re the smart one. I didn’t know what was going on with us.” His voice gets small. This might be the most embarrassing conversation he’s ever had in his life. “I need you to be all bossy about it.”   
  
Kame is quiet for a minute, but when he speaks he sounds warmer than he did before, a bit soft and indulgent like the parent of a spoiled child. “What do you mean, what’s going on with us?”  
  
Jin bites his lip. “Are you going to see Saito again?”  
  
“No,” Kame says. “I called him and told him I didn’t think it would work out.”  
  
“Oh,” Jin says.  
  
“I didn’t think that making out with my best friend barely ten minutes after our first date was exactly the best start for a relationship,” Kame says, like Jin is the biggest moron in the world.  
  
“Oh,” Jin says, feeling relief spread through him. “Oh.”  
  
“As for what we are…” Kame sounds happy now, and just the sound is enough to make Jin shiver. “Let’s just see how it goes.”   
  
“What does that mean?” Jin asks.  
  
“We’re not in a hurry,” Kame says, and for a minute Jin is worried that that means Kame is going to stall this thing indefinitely until he’s satisfied that Jin is like, ~ready~ or some shit. He opens his mouth to protest, but then Kame adds, “Can you pick me up tonight?”  
  
“Oh,” Jin says. “Yeah.”   
  
—  
  
In the first few weeks that they’re seeing each other, they spend a lot of time at Kame’s place, eating dinner late at night and making out on his gigantic 10-seater couch. As the days pass, the weirdness of the idea that Kame is a guy starts to pass and Jin is able to start thinking about the idea of sex in specific terms, instead of in that weird abstract fog that had descended upon him whenever he thought about it before.   
  
He thinks about taking Kame to bed and slowly stripping the clothes away from his skin; of pressing kisses up his stomach and the inside of his wrists. He even thinks about what it will be like to blow him, in idle moments when he’s feeling brave. The thought makes him shiver with equal parts fear and fascination.  
  
It would have been better if Jin had realised earlier, when they were young. Then they could have been awkward, nervous virgins together, and Jin wouldn’t have to feel like such a gigantic loser. Kame would be thin and fragile and he’d stammer Jin’s name as Jin stroked his skin. A shy, desperate boy, who wouldn’t know what he was doing any better than Jin did. Would know even less, probably, because at least Jin had been with a whole bunch of girls back then.   
  
Now, Jin has to deal with this solid, confident man, who always seems like he has his part of the situation firmly under control. Jin is infatuated with him, the easy shift of his muscular thighs in his jeans, the firm shoulders rounding into strong arms. The way he’ll sort of gently nudge Jin until he’s right where he wants him, and then hold him there, stern and demanding. It’s really hot, but Jin feels sort of unprepared. Inadequate.   
  
Jin wants to be good for him. He’s just not entirely sure how. He goes to a fancy bookstore and reads American magazines with headlines like _101 tips to please your man_ and _How to drive him wild!_ but most of the stuff in them seems embarrassing, not to mention impossible for him because he’s not a woman and doesn’t have boobs. He stares a bit wistfully at the lone issue of _The Advocate_ in the top corner, but he probably shouldn’t risk reading it in public like this. Besides, the headlines on the cover are all about serious social issues and shit and all he really wants is some tips on giving head.   
  
He goes home and watches some porn on the internet but he’s so traumatised by what he sees that it doesn’t help at all. They all feature pimpled, skinny young boys being leered at and abused by gross old dudes with moustaches and leather vests. It kind of reminds Jin of being a junior. He hopes Kame isn’t in to this kind of thing.   
  
In the end he has to talk to someone about it, and there is really only one person available to him at this point. He emails Kame: _im worried that when we do it ill be totally crap bc i dont know what im doing_.   
  
It takes what feels like forever for Kame to reply, but it’s really only about twenty minutes.   
  
_That’s hot_ , Kame says, then a minute later, _My sweet little virgin_.   
  
_SHUT THE FUCK UP_ Jin replies, but he does feel better.  
  
—  
  
They see a movie, and Kame can’t help but compare it to the last movie they saw together, six months ago now, and feel a little smug with happiness. They go to a deserted little cinema in a district Kame has never been to before, which is still showing the last Harry Potter movie even though it came out like four months ago. It’s 11 o’clock at night and the only people in the theatre are an adolescent couple who sit in the back row making out before the lights have even gone down, a rowdy group of teenage boys who sit with their feet all over the seats, and a lonely looking old man in the front row.   
  
Jin buys their tickets and their popcorn and leads Kame domineeringly towards the back of the theatre, close to the wall where they are less likely to be seen. He seems to be enjoying being in charge of this excursion, probably because he feels so out of control in every other aspect of the their relationship right now. He keeps asking if Kame is warm enough and offering to go get him a soda instead of the bottle of water Kame chose. After a while, Kame gives up refusing and lets him go, and Jin comes back with a gigantic Diet Coke and a bag of stale chocolates, which he offers sheepishly to Kame as if he has suddenly become aware that he is being ridiculous.   
  
“Sit down, retard,” Kame says, though he has to admit that he’s kind of enjoying the attention. He snuggles into the coat that Jin draped over him before he left, nuzzling his face against the collar and smelling Jin’s shampoo and the faint smokiness of tobacco. “The movie is gonna start.”  
  
Jin eases into his chair just as the lights go down. That familiar music plays and Kame feels a tremor of excitement that is mostly nostalgia. He and Jin saw the first few movies together, and the others he mostly saw on DVD. He fumbles around until he can take Jin’s hand and draw it under his coat blanket. After a few minutes Jin slumps and leans his head on Kame’s shoulder, occasionally whispering questions because he apparently hasn’t seen the movies they didn’t see together at all. Mostly he’s quiet, and his hand slips out of Kame’s and settles on his thigh under the coat, fingers skimming bare skin through the ragged holes in the denim. It’s distracting, but Kame can’t bring himself to make him stop.  
  
They’re probably not as safe as the dark makes it seem, but Kame feels peaceful anyway. Halfway through the move Jin starts nuzzling his ear and kissing his cheek, and Kame thinks, _fuck it_ , and turns so they can make out like the kids in the back row.  
  
—  
  
They dress as Shuuji to Akira for Halloween.   
  
“You have to be the fat one,” Jin says, holding Akira’s costume out to Kame. Kame grabs it, telling him to shut up without venom. Josh is Nobuta, in a voluminous skirt and tangled wig, ‘UGLY’ scrawled on the back of his blazer in yellow paint. When they decided what to wear, Josh hadn’t seen Nobuta, but he marathoned the DVDs one night when he was supposed to be doing prep work for his real job. He keeps going on about how good it was and how Kame and Pi should do more dramas together. Jin tells him to shut the fuck up in case he puts ideas in Johnny’s head.  
  
They go to a private party at a club. Kusano is dressed as Rilakkuma in a costume he bought at Don Quixote’s, and Ryo has lazily dressed as an Eito Ranger - Black Ranger, though. Yoko’s costume hangs comically on Ryo’s tiny frame. Pi shows up really late dressed as Zorro, with Keiko trailing behind him in a flamenco dress. Jin wonders when they got back together.   
  
There are loads of hot chicks around dressed as slutty nurses/angels/schoolgirls. Jin sees Kame looking at him askance when he chats to a girl he vaguely recognises from this thing he went to with Josh once. When she disappears to refresh her champagne, he leans over and says to Kame, “What?”  
  
“I didn’t realise you were acquainted with so many naughty schoolgirls,” Kame says, trying to make it sound like he’s joking but unable to hide the genuinely pissy look on his face.   
  
Jin tugs Kame’s blue tie. “I’m friendlier with a naughty schoolboy.”   
  
“And everyone thinks I’m the lame one.” Kame rolls his eyes and pulls his tie out of Jin’s hands irritably, but he can’t hide his pleased little smile from Jin. When the girl comes back Kame is friendlier and ends up talking to her for longer than Jin did, because he finds out she is from the UK and works for some designer Kame knows pretty well. He asks her about a billion questions about London and Jin wonders why he still hasn’t visited when his interest obviously has not waned.  
  
Eventually, Josh comes over, black wig slightly askew, and harasses Jin into dancing. He seems to think that the fact that Jin has been sitting in a corner with Kame all night instead of trying to hook up with any one of the hot girls in the club is an indication that Jin is in a crappy mood. Jin lets him think that, because otherwise he can’t explain why.  
He dances with a big group of people because he’s worried about what Kame will think, but when he looks over Kame is talking to Peter and doesn’t seem worried at all. Jin catches his eye and tries to beckon him over, but Kame turns him down with a slight shake of his head, until Seishun Amigo starts playing over the PA system. Jin glances in surprise at the DJ booth, where Josh had been talking to the DJ.   
  
Jin reaches Kame just as Pi does.   
  
“Shuuji!” Pi says, grabbing his arm. “It’s our song!”   
  
“I’m Akira,” Kame says, shaking his tie for Pi to see.   
  
“ _I’m_ Shuuji,” Jin says, grabbing Kame’s other arm and tugging. “It’s _our_ song.”   
  
It seems to be everyone’s song; Jin looks out on the dance floor to see all the locals dressed as Doraemon and Ultraman doing the Seishun Amigo dance with varying levels of drunken accuracy while the foreigners look on in polite confusion.  
  
“Do you even remember the choreography?” Kame complains in his ear as Jin drags him onto the floor.   
  
“Yes,” Jin says, “It’s like the easiest dance in the world.”  
  
He’s a beat behind Kame and Pi as they move through the steps, but that’s still better than Josh, who gives up halfway through and just does the NOBUTA POWER! pose over and over, interspersed with the Macarena. Ryo appears behind Pi and they end up with five thumbs in the centre when there should only be two.   
  
After that, Kame stays on the dancefloor with Jin, but he’s careful not to dance alone with Jin too obviously, even though it is apparently totally alright to dirty dance with Pi or let Josh-Nobuta booty-dance against him like a filthy whore.   
  
They wouldn’t usually attract too much attention at a place like this, which is habitually full of celebrities, but apparently the Akanishi / Kamenashi / Yamashita combination is enough to grab the attention of even this jaded crowd, and Jin starts to notice that people are staring at them more than usual, that a few people might have taken photos. He starts to feel uneasy and he steps back from where he’d been hovering at Kame’s shoulder, so Ryo is standing between them. He wonders if his friends catch the longing glances he keeps sending Kame, who is doing some kind of ridiculous two-step with his arm wrapped across Pi’s shoulder. When Usher comes on, Jin just wants to push Pi away and pull Kame up against him, the way he might have risked if Kame was his girlfriend. Fuck Johnny’s rules. He hates that he has to be even more careful than usual, just because Kame is a guy, or whatever. Who cares? Seriously, who the hell cares?  
  
After a while, Jin can’t take it anymore and he leans over and tugs the sleeve of Kame’s blazer. Kame turns to look at him and Jin knows that he understands with a single glance. He breaks away from Pi and surges against Jin for a minute, hand on his arm, just long enough to murmur in his ear. To anyone else they probably look like two good friends trying to hear each other over the music, but Jin still feels an illicit thrill as Kame says, “Do you wanna get out of here?”  
  
“Yes,” Jin says. God, yes.  
  
—  
  
“I wanted to dance with you,” Jin says, after Kame has locked them safely inside his apartment and fetched them both drinks.   
  
Kame looks at him. Jin looks ridiculous and overgrown in the familiar school uniform, but beautiful, as always, all messy hair and moist lips over the white collar and loosened tie. He picks up the remote and turns the stereo on. A slow beat fills the air. Something Jin was listening to the other day, while Kame showered. Kame doesn’t know where it came from.  
  
“We could dance here,” Kame says, drawing up to Jin and taking him by the hips.   
  
Jin moves with him for a minute, hands sliding up his back, but then he buries his face in Kame’s neck and laughs, “It’s embarrassing here.”   
  
Kame laughs too, because Jin’s mouth on his neck is ticklish, and because he’s happy. “We could do other stuff,” he says, and hooks his fingers into Jin’s tie, tugging it loose.  
  
Jin’s ears are bright pink as he stammers, “Right,” and kisses Kame, giggling happily when Kame stands on his toes for a better angle. Kame likes that Jin is a bit taller than him, but not so tall that he feels like a midget. Jin likes that he’s taller because it makes him feel manly and smug, and less gay. He says that isn’t why, but Kame knows him pretty well.  
  
Kame takes him by the hand and leads him into the bedroom, the slight resistance in his posture contradicted by the determined look in his eyes. He looks around Kame’s bedroom suspiciously as they enter, and as relief spreads over his face, Kame wonders what he expected to find that would make it any different from any of the other hundred times he’s been in here. Chains on the bed, maybe, or the leather riding chaps Kame is going to change into. Jin told him about the porn he watched. Kame would tease him about it, but he can sense that Jin’s resolve is precarious enough already, and he really would like to get laid some time in the next century.   
  
He pushes Jin down on the bed and crawls over him, kissing him reassuringly. “We can stop any time you want,” he murmurs, pulling Jin’s tie off and discarding it on the bedside table. He helps pull Jin’s blazer off and starts unbuttoning his shirt slowly.   
  
Jin’s hand covers his on the fifth button, and he asks uncertainly, “Are you going to fuck me?”  
  
Kame laughs, resting his forehead against Jin’s. “I don’t think you’re ready for that,” he says bluntly.   
  
“Yeah,” Jin agrees, looking more sure of himself now. “But… other stuff…”  
  
“Yeah,” Kame grins, feeling elated when Jin grins back at him, if a bit hesitantly. “Other stuff.”


	6. Part Six

Jin loves the other stuff. It’s nothing like the porn Jin saw. Kame is funny and gentle and keeps pausing to ask Jin if he wants to stop, which is kind of annoying but also really cute. His fears about his inexperience are apparently unfounded, or at least, Kame certainly seems to enjoy himself. A few times, he halts impatiently to offer instruction, but that isn’t as humiliating as Jin had anticipated. It’s kind of comfortingly familiar, really. If there is anything Jin is accustomed to, it is taking barked orders from Kamenashi. Sheepishly, Jin has to admit that it kind of turns him on. Admit to himself, that is. He’d rather die than admit it to Kame.   
  
When they drift off to sleep, Kame is so reassuringly solid that Jin doesn’t have to worry about crushing him to death when he rests his head on his shoulder and wraps his arm around his waist, and he’s already seen Kame without make up, so he doesn’t have to worry about waking up and seeing a total stranger in his bed, which has happened with girls a few times.   
  
Kame’s alarm sounds at 5am, and Jin groans unhappily, crawling on top of him and holding him down when he tries to push the blankets back and climb out of bed.   
  
“You can’t just violate me and then leave me all alone,” he whines. “Blow it off. Whatever it is.”   
  
“I was the one that was violated,” Kame reminds him, but his protests subside when Jin presses his mouth to the bare stretch of neck behind his ear and bites, softly, and he ends up blowing off almost a whole morning of meetings to lie in bed with Jin and fool around.   
  
“You’re so irresponsible,” Jin teases at about 8am. He’s lying with his back to Kame’s chest and their legs tangled together, more like forks than spoons.   
  
“Yeah, well,” Kame says, twisting his fingers through Jin’s. “I’m not going to make a habit of it. It’s a special occasion.”  
  
“They’re all gonna think you’re hungover,” Jin says. Kame had told his manager that he’d eaten something that turned his stomach, but no doubt word is out about the halloween party. On his own, Kame would get the benefit of the doubt, but with Jin…  
  
Kame snorts. “‘Cause you’re such a bad influence on me.”   
  
“Yeah,” Jin agrees happily, digging his chin into Kame’s shoulder until he squirms and tries to elbow him away.   
  
“Cut it out,” Kame snaps. “You’re so annoying.”   
  
When Jin doesn’t stop, he threatens, “I’ll touch your collarbone,” and Jin subsides, nuzzling into his neck instead. Kame stretches and relaxes against him, all sweet and complacent again. Jin squeezes his hand. They lie in silence for a while, and Jin nearly falls asleep; Kame is so warm and comfy that it makes him feel like he might never be able to bring himself to move again.   
  
After a while, Kame brings Jin’s fist to his lips and kisses it, asking, “Why did you choose me?”   
  
“Huh?” Jin murmurs drowsily. “When?”  
  
Kame talks against Jin’s knuckles. “When we were kids,” he says. “At the auditions.” He turns Jin’s hand over and presses a kiss to the inside of his wrist. “You could have talked to the kid sitting between us, but you talked to me instead.”  
  
Jin tries to remember; it’s so long ago now and half the time he doesn’t remember what happened last week, let alone more than ten years ago. “I don’t remember any other kid,” he says.   
  
Kame snorts. “Typical.”  
  
“I remember you, though,” Jin says, pulling his hand free and tugging on Kame’s shoulder until he turns over and they are lying face to face. He pulls the blankets up over Kame’s bare shoulder, because he looks cold. “You were such a dork.”   
  
“Shut up,” Kame says. “I was a late bloomer.”   
  
“You had that stupid hair, and your face was all mixed up like someone put you together wrong and you ended up with too much eyebrow and nowhere near enough eye.”  
  
“ _Shut up_ ,” Kame says more forcefully, pinching Jin’s side painfully. “Forget I asked.”   
  
Jin continues as if he hadn’t spoken. “And we were all supposed to write our name on a list, but everyone was fighting too much, and management just stood around watching.” In retrospect, that was probably part of the audition, but that hadn’t occurred to Jin at the time, he’d fought as hard for the pen as the rest of them. “And then all of a sudden you started bossing everyone around and making us line up all orderly and shit. You made everyone listen to you even though you were this dweeby little loser.”   
  
Kame claws him viciously on the hip and Jin yelps.  
  
“I thought that was pretty cool,” Jin says, and the claws at Jin’s side turn gentle and soothing.   
  
“I don’t really remember that part,” Kame admits. He’s blushing a little, as if retroactively embarrassed for the little dictator with his spiky hair and lame zippered sweatpants.   
  
“When you had us all queuing up you didn’t even go to the front to get the best spot,” Jin says. “And I thought maybe you had some super smart strategy so I went in the middle too.”   
  
“I didn’t want to go first,” Kame says, apparently remembering that with greater clarity. “I didn’t even really know what we were doing there.”   
  
“I thought, ‘that kid’s going places’,” Jin says, and Kame starts laughing.   
  
“You were the only one who thought so,” he says, eyes sparkling, and Jin has never been so glad that he’d been the one, back then, to see what everyone else hadn’t, because it led him here, to this moment. To these arms.   
  
“Well, I was right,” he says, “Who’s the dumbass now?”  
  
“It’s still you,” Kame says, and swallows Jin’s outrage in a kiss.  
  
—  
  
Kame can’t stop smiling, even though he knows it is starting to freak everyone out. He’s been bouncing around all afternoon making a nuisance of himself, humming and giggling and generally being a pain in the ass.   
  
Over their lunch break, he jiggles at Ueda’s side, rambling inconsequentially and eating all of the fries that Ueda rejects because of their saturated fat content. Ueda keeps staring at him as if he’s never seen him before, or at least not in a very long time.   
  
“What is wrong with you?” he says finally, pulling his fries away irritably as if he’s going to eat them just to spite Kame.   
  
“Nothing,” Kame says, grinning widely. “I’m just really happy to be here with the members.”   
  
Ueda stares. “You’re being really gross.” He cringes when Kame wraps an arm around him and leans his chin on his shoulder, making kissy faces in the general vicinity of his face.   
  
“I’m just so glad we’re friends,” Kame says, laughing with pleasure when Ueda pushes his chair out and storms off, passing Koki, who is returning from the studio floor where he has been posing for his solo shots under a blanket of falling polystyrene snow. Christmas shots already, even though it is barely November. He sits in Ueda’s vacated chair and immediately starts eating the abandoned bowl of fries.   
  
“Ho, ho, ho,” Kame calls as he reaches out and starts pulling stray pieces of polystyrene from Koki’s white-blond hair.   
  
“Someone’s in a good mood,” Koki says suspiciously, mouth full of food.  
  
“Merry Christmas,” Kame responds, leaning heavily on Koki’s shoulder. He knows he’s being an obnoxious, irritating brat, but it’s been a long time since he felt this happy and he feels manic and irrepressible. He can barely keep in the giggles that are bubbling in his chest. He must look like a crazy person.  
  
Koki watches him for a while, considering, and then he claps his arm around Kame in return and bursts into a loud, jolly rendition of Jingle Bells. Kame’s giggles burst free and he joins in, the two of them singing every Christmas carol they know, booming and happy and off-key.   
  
—  
  
“Does your family know about you?” Jin asks very late one night, when they are playing poker on Kame’s living room floor in their t-shirts and sweats. Kame is winning because he always wins when he’s in a good mood, and he’s always in a good mood lately. “Like. The gay stuff.”  
  
“Yeah,” Kame says, shuffling the cards one-handed. The cards all have terrible, ugly photos of Yamapi on the back. Pi gave them to him for Christmas a few years ago. He said he found them in an idol store in Harajuku and bought a dozen decks.   
  
“Do they know about me?” Jin asks.   
  
Kame considers this. “No,” he says finally. “Not really.”  
  
Jin gathers his cards up and holds them against his chest. Pi’s shiny printed face gazes back at Kame between Jin’s fingers. “What does that mean?”  
  
Kame gets his own cards into order, remembering back to that horrible, nervewracking time when he’d made a kind of spur-of-the-moment announcement at a rare family dinner. “I told them because I was dating this guy and I thought it could be kind of serious,” he says, feeling a little thrilled when Jin makes a pissy little face at that. “And Koji was just like, ‘When did you break up with Akanishi?’”   
  
“Are you serious?” Jin says.  
  
“I tried to tell them that it wasn’t like that but they didn’t believe me,” Kame says. “And the more I denied it the less they believed me.”   
  
Jin groans and buries his face in his knee. “Great, so your parents think, what, I broke your heart and then ran off to America?”  
  
“Just my brothers,” Kame says. “You knocked up a teenager and fled to America and I hooked up with a detective on the rebound.”   
  
“Oh, god,” Jin says, looking a bit green.   
  
“My mother just kept sort of hinting that I should give you a second chance,” Kame says. “I don’t know what she thinks happened, exactly. Just that I apparently dumped you.”   
  
He still remembers his mother carefully broaching the subject after he’d broken up with Tadayoshi, the detective. Jin was not long back from America the first time, and his mother must have seen them on the news, smiling and looking happy.   
  
“Maybe he’s grown up a bit,” she kept saying.   
  
Kame’s father’s thoughts on the subject are a total mystery. He prefers not to discuss Kame’s boyfriends directly under any circumstances. Kame would probably be more upset about that, but his father barely wants to discuss any of his brother’s love lives either, so it’s really not so bad. Especially when Kame considers how things had gone for some of his friends who had come out to family. Or all the friends who don’t feel like they can at all. His father even lets him bring guys to family events and stuff. He just refers to them as “Kazuya’s friends”. It makes it awkward when he brings someone who really is just a friend. Like Uchi.   
  
The only direct comment he has ever made on the subject is that he doesn’t like Hitoshi, because he thinks he’s a pathetic weakling. “He’s not strong enough for you,” he kept telling Kame, drunkenly one night after they’d been fishing with his brothers all day. “You need someone with a bit of backbone.”   
  
Kame wonders what he’d think of Jin.  
  
Jin is still looking miserable, so Kame casts his cards aside and crawls across the divide until he can sit next to Jin, their backs pressed against the sofa. Kame can feel it whenever Jin moves.   
  
“Don’t worry about it,” Kame says. “I’ll explain the situation. If it ever comes to that.”  
  
Jin nods, but then he makes a face and stares down at the cards in his face.  
  
“I’ve been thinking about telling my mother about us,” he says. “Eventually, I mean. Not yet.”  
  
Kame threads his fingers through Jin’s and holds on.  
  
—  
  
Jin does want to tell his mother, but there’s still so much about them that he doesn’t understand either, and he thinks he should have answers to those questions for when she inevitably asks them.  
  
One night, he’s sitting on Kame’s kitchen bench, slippered feet kicking against the cupboards in a way that makes Kame scowl at him irritably. Kame is on the other side of the kitchen grating cheese for their pasta, facing away from Jin. Jin’s eyes linger on the knot that holds his apron firm around his hips.  
  
“I don’t think I’m into any other guys,” he muses aloud.   
  
“Huh?” Kame asks, pausing in his task. He turns around and leans on the bench, dusting cheese off his hands. After a minute, he crosses to the sink and scrubs them clean.  
  
“I don’t think I’m gay,” Jin says. “I’m just into you.”  
  
Kame snorts.   
  
“What?” Jin asks.   
  
“You might not be gay, but I sincerely doubt that I’m the only guy you could be into,” Kame says. He crosses the floor and stands between Jin’s legs, hands on his thighs.   
  
“I think you are,” Jin says. “I mean, you’re practically a girl, so maybe you just don’t count.”   
  
“I’m not a girl,” Kame says crossly. He leans into Jin and speaks close to his ear. “Close your eyes,” he murmurs, and Jin does. He puts his hands on Kame’s shoulders, feeling the strength of the muscle there.   
  
“You’re at a club,” Kame says, his voice low and husky and intimate, only audible because his mouth is so close that Jin can feel his breath moving the hair around his ears.   
  
“What are you doing?” Jin interrupts.   
  
“ _You’re at a club,_ ” Kame repeats insistently, and Jin shivers and falls quiet. “It’s packed full and you’re dancing, it’s your favourite song.”  
  
Jin loves Kame’s voice when he talks like this, like Jin is the only person that ever needs to hear him. The sound of it makes him shiver and he slides his hands down Kame’s arms and hooks them around his elbows.  
  
“You feel someone watching you, but at first you can’t find them, because everyone is watching you.” Kame’s hand on his thigh moves up and settles on his hip, fingernails scratching at his skin through the thin t-shirt he is wearing. Jin can see the club, feel the moist air crowded with breath. He shifts on the bench, feeling the dull thud of his heart pick up. “Then you see him, across the floor. Suddenly, it’s like you’re the only two people in the room.” He nuzzles the side of Jin’s face and Jin’s hand tightens around his elbow reflexively. “He’s got gorgeous blond hair, and he’s so tall and lean that it seems like his legs go forever. And he just stares at you, and all you can think about is letting him take you home.”   
  
“Kame,” Jin whines impatiently, wanting him to hurry up and _do_ something.   
  
“He comes closer through the crowd, because you just stand there waiting for him, watching the way he moves, his muscles and the smile that is just for you.” Kame’s hand leaves his hip and tangles in his hair. “And he gets to you and slides his hand around your hips, in front of everyone, and he leans in to whisper to you…”  
  
Kame presses kisses beneath Jin’s ear and Jin feels hot and cold all over, and his arm slides around Kame’s back and holds them more firmly together.   
  
“He says…” Kame says, lips dragging against the shell of Jin’s ear.  
  
“What?” Jin says.   
  
“ _Ireguchi deguchi Taguchi desu~_ ” Kame sings, Taguchi’s demented face exploding into the hot little fantasy, and Jin almost falls off the bench in his flailing horror. He’s panting, half from the leftover arousal and half from abject panic.   
  
“Kame!” he splutters, adrift with misery and betrayal. He holds his hands against his chest defensively, as if he has been physically wounded.  
  
Kame punches him, hard, in the thigh. “Don’t think about other guys, douchebag,” he says, and goes back to grating his cheese.  
  
—  
  
In late November, Johnny calls Kame in for an after hours meeting. Kame tries not to think about it, but he’s preoccupied by it all day, when he’s supposed to be learning the choreography for their new song. He’s afraid he knows too well what Johnny wants to talk about.  
  
Johnny looks tired when he walks in. He’s on the phone, so he doesn’t greet Kame, just gestures for him to sit opposite. He hands him a manila folder with his own name scrawled across the top in red marker. Kame stares down at it and somehow knows what will be in it without even having to look.  
  
When he does, it’s not as bad as he had imagined. It’s just Jin and Kame outside his apartment building, each carrying a cotton bag full of groceries. The images are without context. They could be anywhere. They could almost be anyone, if not for a few shots where you can see slivers of their faces under beanies and dark glasses.   
  
There’s only one photo that is potentially dangerous, really, and even that isn’t that bad. They were standing outside the building because there was something wrong with the intercom, Kame remembers. They’d been waiting for ages and Jin reached out to grab Kame’s wrist and look at his watch. That’s not what it looks like in the photo, though. It looks like they’re holding hands. Their intimacy is laid bare.   
  
His head starts to ache.  
  
Johnny hangs up the phone and before he can even say hello, Kame blurts, “I won’t stop.”   
  
Johnny blinks, but doesn’t seem as surprised as Kame is himself. He has a moment to feel ashamed of his own selfishness; what the hell would happen to the others, if Kame was thrown out of the jimusho? If Kame was outed in the press?   
  
“Kazuya,” Johnny scolds after a minute.  
  
“Don’t ask me to,” Kame repeats. “I won’t.”   
  
He has never been this rude to Johnny before and it makes his stomach churn nervously, but he can’t help it. Every time he opens his mouth to rephrase more diplomatically, the same words, the same blunt refusal, threatens to pour out. He chokes it down, hands making fists on his knees.   
  
“I can’t,” he manages finally. “I can’t, this time.” His leg trembles and he tries to force it still with a hand flat on his thigh. “You’re the one that asked me to start seeing him,” he reminds Johnny childishly.   
  
Johnny sighs and takes the manila folder back. “I’m not asking you to stop,” he says finally. “I’m just asking you to be more careful.” He shakes the folder in his hand. “You know better than this, Kazuya.”  
  
Kame’s heart rate slows and he can breathe again, and his calm, businesslike manners kick back in just in time for him to say, “I understand, sir.”   
  
“You can go,” Johnny says, dropping the folder into a filing cabinet full of rows and rows of identical cream folders. “Make sure that idiot behaves himself.”  
  
“Yes sir,” Kame says, rising. He crosses to the doorway and pauses. “I’m sorry for my outburst.”   
  
“It’s okay, kid.” He’s writing something in his big diary and not looking at Kame. “You do what you have to do.”  
  
“Yeah,” Kame says.   
  
“Get out of here,” Johnny growls. For a moment, Kame feels so grateful to him that he almost crosses the floor and hugs him.  
  
“Goodnight, Gramps,” he murmurs instead, and slips out of the office and into the silent halls of the jimusho, down to the car and back to his apartment where Jin is waiting for him.  
  
—  
  
Against his better judgment, Kame tells Jin about the meeting. Jin doesn’t really seem to care that their relationship might be splashed all over the tabloids (“It’ll be the best thing they’ve had to say about me in a while,” he’d said sheepishly) but he’s angry that Johnny was meddling in their lives, _again_ , and Kame had only just barely been able to talk him out of going into the office and kicking up a fuss about it.  
  
A week or two later, Kame is sitting in the _Potato_ office when he sees the mock ups for the December issue lying on a typesetter’s desk. Jin’s moody face pouts up at him from the page. Kame scans the interview.  
  
 _Lately I stay at Kamenashi’s condo a lot… There are always a lot of people in my house. Kamenashi’s place is like a girl’s, it’s always clean, and he has good food. Basically, I’m a freeloader [laughs]… Should I be paying rent?_  
  
A few years ago, Kame would have been explosive with rage and anxiety, but now, he just laughs. He asks Jin about it that night.  
  
“Hiding in plain sight,” Jin says, making kind of retarded karate chop gestures. “This is the way of the ninja.”  
  
Kame laughs and calls him a retard, but it isn’t a bad strategy, really. A few weeks later, when he’s sitting through a painfully awkward interview on _Hanamaru Cafe_ , they ask him what his plans for Christmas are.  
  
“I’ve got a date with Akanishi Jin,” he says, giggling at the host’s theatrically shocked intake of breath.  
  
—  
  
On the nights that Kame works late, Jin goes clubbing without him. If Kame finishes early enough, he sometimes swings by and picks him up. He idles his car in the alley behind the club, reading the news on his phone. Jin always takes forever to come out and is full of apologies as he tumbles into the passenger seat, pink-cheeked and a bit red-eyed, but never falling down drunk or anything. He always twists a bit in his seat to face Kame, seatbelt stretched awkwardly around his body.   
  
Sometimes, Kame wonders if Jin chats up girls when he’s not around. Probably not, he thinks with a small measure of confidence. He’s pretty sure they are exclusive, but can’t quite bring himself to broach the subject in case Jin’s answer disappoints him. He’d been serious when he told Jin he wasn’t in a hurry. Even if Jin were messing around with girls, Kame’s not all that worried. He will be the last man standing.  
  
One night, Jin makes him drive out of the city, up to their lookout. “If we go home, you’ll just go to sleep, and I’m wide awake,” he complains.   
  
Kame has an early call the next day, but he does it anyway. His afternoon is free; he can catch a nap between planning for _Going_ in the morning and the important dinner party he is supposed to attend at night. He has survived on far less sleep.  
  
Jin is very merry, but he is not drunk. He seems pleased at Kame’s compliance and doesn’t try to change the stereo from the Joan Baez album Kame had been listening to earlier, though he must be dying to. At first, he chatters about his day, but as they ease through the crowded outer suburbs and into the relative darkness of the country, he drifts off to sleep with his hand on Kame’s thigh.  
  
Kame rolls his eyes and lets him sleep until they reach their destination.   
  
“I only closed my eyes for a minute,” Jin says sheepishly when he wakes, wiping the drool from his cheek.   
  
“That’s funny, because you snored for forty minutes,” Kame says, opening his door and stepping out into the freezing night air. He wanders over to the platform overlooking the sprawling city lights and lights a cigarette, his first of the week. When Jin joins him at the rail he takes it out of Kame’s hand and smokes most of it on his own.  
  
They get cans of coffee from the vending machine and a blanket from the trunk and open the roof of Kame’s convertible. They push the seats back as far as they will go and lie side by side, divided by the centre console, staring up at the night sky. It’s so cold. There is nobody around for miles, not even other couples looking for privacy.  
  
Kame starts to get really sleepy and he wishes Jin hadn’t been drinking earlier, so he could make him drive home. He rolls onto his side and finds Jin staring at him, eyes dark and considering.  
  
“Why don’t you ever call me by a pet name?” Jin asks out of nowhere.  
  
Kame blinks. There’s no reason, really. Contrary to his image, he’s not really a goopy pet names kind of guy, particularly with his boyfriends. They come naturally when he’s flirting as part of his job. In his private life, not so much.   
  
Jin, on the other hand, is all about the stupid pet names. Kame’s not sure if he’s aware that he slips up sometimes and calls Kame ‘baby’ in bed; probably not, and Kame’s not about to tell him, because he kind of likes it. As long as it stays in the bedroom.   
  
“I don’t know,” Kame says. “No reason. What do you want me to call you?”   
  
Jin shrugs.   
  
“Jin-jin?” Kame asks, snickering when Jin makes a face. “Boo-boo?”   
  
“You’re so shit,” Jin whines, burying his face in his arm.   
  
“Akkun?” Kame says. He reaches out and takes Jin’s hand and clutches it to his chest. “Oppa~?”  
  
“Seriously, fuck off,” Jin says, pulling his hand out of Kame’s reach and burying it under his own body. He buries his face in the side of his car seat, visibly embarrassed. “You’re like the worst girlfriend I’ve ever had.”   
  
Kame pulls a face, and Jin lifts his head. “What?”  
  
“Sorry,” Kame says, laughter quivering beneath his inquisitive voice, “Were you under the impression that _I’m_ the girl?”  
  
Jin squawks and tries to kick Kame in the shin, but his foot painfully hits the gearshift instead, and Kame’s laughter bubbles out. “I hate you,” Jin says.  
  
“Relax, honey,” Kame says, half making fun of him and half trying, in his way, to fulfil Jin’s wishes. It feels weird and he’ll probably never do it again. “We’re both dudes.”  
  
For a minute, Kame wonders if that thought will freak Jin out, but it doesn’t seem to. He just huffs and lets Kame worm his way under his torso to take hold of the hand trapped underneath.  
  
They drive back into the city at daybreak, stopping at a McDonalds drive thru for breakfast. Between them, they eat four sausage and egg McMuffins and five hash browns. Kame drives them back to his place. He only has time to shower and drink a Red Bull before he has to leave for work.  
  
He leaves Jin sleeping on his sofa, all wrapped up in the fleecy Tokyo Giants blanket that lives on the armchair.  
  
When he’s leaving the _Going_ offices, he gets an email from Jin.  
  
 _ur the worst gurlfriend but u r a pretty good boyfriend i guess,_ it says. _will u b home soon?_  
  
Kame goes home without answering and finds Jin asleep on the couch again, empty bowl of cereal on the floor at his side. The TV is on some channel Kame didn’t even know he had, playing an episode of Oprah about two little girls in Tennessee who started a charity for their friend with leukaemia. Kame crawls onto the couch beneath the blanket and watches the episode, sniffling a bit at their hopeful little faces.   
  
He falls asleep before the end of the episode, slumping warm and exhausted into Jin’s side. He’s late for his dinner party.   
  
—  
  
On a Wednesday morning, Pi comes over to Jin’s place to play PS3 and complain about his schedule. Jin’s schedule is nowhere near as packed as Pi’s, for the most part, but he’d still had to shuffle some things around to be here when Pi was free. The editor at Myojo is probably pissed at him, but Jin doesn’t care. This sort of stuff is worth it to him. Sometimes it seems like it would be easy to let Pi drift away, the way most of his old friends have, but Jin will hold on to him with bloodied stumps for fingernails, muscles straining, screaming his name. Even if they only see each other a few times a year. He doesn’t know who he is if Pi isn’t his best friend. One of his best friends. Pi and that retard Josh and the guy he’s been secretly sleeping with. Jin’s life is complicated.  
  
“So what’s going on with Kame?” Pi asks, mid-lap in their game of Gran Turismo. Jin’s Lamborghini careens off the track and crashes into a wall, bursting into flames. Pi cheers as his Ferrari crosses the finish line.   
  
“What do you mean?” Jin affects nonchalance, shaking out his wrist where it has cramped up during the game.   
  
“I ran into him the other day and he was all cheerful, it was really obnoxious,” Pi says. He picks up his juice and swigs from it as the game runs through his championship montage. “Is he getting laid?”  
  
Jin makes an involuntary sound, and Pi’s head turns. Jin wants to mash his hand into Pi’s nose to stop him from seeing.   
  
“Why is your face all red?” he asks dumbly.   
  
“It’s not,” Jin says, though he is well aware that it is. He can feel the heat of his cheeks even without touching them with his fingers.   
  
“Oh my god,” Pi says.   
  
Jin doesn’t say anything. He can’t. He doesn’t know if he was ready to tell Pi this, but he can’t bring himself to deny it, either. Not to Pi.   
  
“Is something…” It seems like he’s somehow not sure how to say it, though Jin can see in his eyes that he is absolutely certain that he is correct. “Going on… between you and Kame?”  
  
Jin steels himself, resolute. “We’re seeing how it goes,” he says casually, as if this isn’t the first time he’s come out to anyone who actually counts. As if it’s no big deal. Pi claps his hand over his mouth, and Jin’s confidence falters. “Have you got a problem with that?” he challenges.  
  
Pi shakes his head and puts his hands on Jin’s shoulders. “I’m so happy,” he says, with exaggerated sincerity. “You finally found a nice girl.”  
  
Jin shrugs off his grasp, overcome by equal parts irritation and relief. “I’m gonna tell him you said that,” he threatens.   
  
“Go ahead,” Pi says, picking up his controller and starting a new game. “Tell him I give this beautiful union my heartfelt blessing.”  
  
This is why, no matter what, Jin will always make time for Pi.  
  
—  
  
They have their first big fight in January. It’s not a little big fight, either, it’s a really huge, epic fight, the kind that leaves Jin sitting alone and miserable in his car in the parking lot of a suburban McDonalds at 3am, eating multiple Quarter Pounders and wondering if everything might be over between them.  
  
Kame had been in a snappy mood all evening. He’s been so busy lately that they’ve barely seen each other for a few hours every week, and most of that is spent sleeping. KAT-TUN have begun planning for their annual spring/summer tour, which is due to start in late April. Jin gets the feeling they’ve been arguing about the plans, but that isn’t unusual for them. That’s one of the things he misses most about being in a group, really. Having someone around to tell him when his ideas are awesome and when they’re just fucking retarded.  
  
Kame leaves the big binder full of notes from their planning meeting on his bedside table while he’s showering. Jin gets bored waiting for him and starts leafing through it, at first with idle interest and then with a red pen scribbling notes in the margins. Most of them are just helpful technical suggestions about where everyone should stand and queries about why the fuck they’re leaving _Real Face_ until the second act. In the margin beside the notes about Kame’s solo – in which he’ll be dressed as some kind of bizarre space cowboy – he writes _you’re so lame_ with a little heart so that Kame doesn’t get all pissy about it. It’s a thick binder but he skims more than half of it. Kame is in the shower for a really long time.   
  
He finally emerges in a cloud of steam, skin flushed blotchy and red from the hot water. He’s wearing a pair of loose pyjama pants that Jin has never seen before and is roughly towelling his hair dry. It’s getting really long but Jin won’t let him cut it. He pauses in the doorway for a minute, watching Jin on the bed.  
  
“What are you doing?” he asks.   
  
“Oh,” Jin says, freezing with the red pen clutched in his fist. “I was just looking.”   
  
Kame crosses to his side and touches the edge of the book, reading Jin’s note aloud. “‘This is a stupid song, do _Signal_ instead.’” He scowls and closes the binder, withdrawing it from Jin’s hands. “You know, when you left the group, I’m pretty sure you forfeited your right to an opinion on the setlist.”  
  
He’s trying to make his voice light and unaffected, but it’s a tone Jin has heard before, though not in a long time. His old friend Rampage-kun. Jin shrinks in on himself, ready for explosion.   
  
“I was just trying to help,” he says, rolling over and tugging on Kame’s wrist. Sometimes he can be coaxed out of a bad mood, if you get him right at the moment. If Jin makes the right joke at the right moment, Kame will laugh instead of snapping, and everything will be ok.   
  
“Well, don’t.” Kame yanks his wrist out of Jin’s grasp and crosses to the dresser, leaving the binder there. His towel is spread over his shoulders like a cape.   
  
“I still care about what happens to KAT-TUN,” Jin ventures after a moment. “I still want you guys to be the best.”  
  
Kame scoffs without humour. “Maybe you should have thought about that before you walked out.”   
  
Nausea slams through Jin and he cries, “That’s not fair!”   
  
From there, things sort of escalated out of control, and later, Jin cannot remember exactly what was said, except that every word from Kame’s bitchy, bitter little lips had landed like a physical blow until Jin had stormed out of the apartment because he was honestly worried they might kill each other. He’d only intended to drive around the block and then go back, but he’d ended up driving to the suburb where they both grew up, parking in the McDonalds and just sitting there for an hour.  
  
He’d told Kame, months ago, that they should talk about all this then. It would have been so much easier then. They could have resolved it or not resolved it and Jin would have been fine. Now, the idea of Kame sitting at home seething at him makes him feel sick with misery.  
  
Leaving KAT-TUN had not been part of Jin’s plan. Not really. No-one really seems to believe him when he says that, but it is true. He’d thought he’d go off and do his solo stuff and then come back, same as always. Like Pi does, or Koichi, or just about everybody that isn’t Jin. Every now and then he’d fantasised about the idea of leaving them and never having to sing stupid _Real Face_ again, but it had never actually seemed like an actual possibility. In their own messed up way, KAT-TUN are a family. Sometimes you hate your family and you don’t want to go to their stupid, boring parties, but you always do. Because you have to. Because that’s just how it is.  
  
The reality of being kicked out had been devastating. With the benefit of time, Jin can admit that the old man had done what was best for all of them, but at the time, it felt like he’d been thrown out of a plane without a parachute, and there were lions circling in the savannah below. And the plane was about to crash into a cliff with all his oldest friends inside.   
  
Tonight, Kame had accused him of not even caring enough to let them know that he’d officially left the band, a claim that had sliced deep, because that isn’t how it went down at all, and Jin had thought Kame knew him well enough to know that. That nothing happened the way he wanted it to.   
  
The old man had called him in and told him he’d made the decision and Jin had spent about five hours in his office arguing about it, just going round and round and round the same territory, always turning out the same way. At midnight, Johnny had said, “It’s over, kid. You have two days to tell them.”   
  
Jin had tried to call his bluff. He’d refused to tell them, thinking that if he just held out long enough, one of his voicemails might actually make a difference and Johnny would change his mind. After two days, though, Johnny had finally answered his phone. He’d listened to Jin for a minute, and then he’d said, “It’s America and your solo work, or KAT-TUN. That’s it. Make your choice.”   
  
Jin had been unable to reply. At that point, he hadn’t even known why he would want to stay in KAT-TUN, just that suddenly, he did. Desperately. Just not enough to give up all the other things that are suddenly in his grasp. Kame would make the sacrifice, Jin knows. Pi probably would too. Jin just wasn’t built that way.   
  
“I thought so,” Johnny said.  
  
“This is BULLSHIT,” Jin exploded.   
  
“Careful,” Johnny said. “You’re not too old to be suspended.”  
  
The next day, Jin had turned on his television and seen KAT-TUN standing in a miserable, bewildered little line, admitting with exaggerated laughter that they hadn’t even known he was back in the country, let alone talked to him. Then he’d crawled into bed and slept for three days, dreaming of a version of Peacefuldays that is only K T T U N.  
  
In retrospect, Jin should probably have talked to Kame about all this earlier. He’d known, deep down, that there was no way some part of Kame wasn’t stewing about the whole thing, even if it was a small part of him buried deep down inside. Even when they weren’t really friends, they had still been brothers at arms, and Jin isn’t sure that he could be nearly so understanding if the situation had been reversed. He tries to imagine stepping out on stage and singing _Real Face_ without Kame and something inside him shrivels and dies. It’s always easier to be the one that leaves than the one who is left behind.   
  
He shoves what is left of his final quarter pounder back in the bag and scrubs his face with his hands. He wonders if Kame is still mad, still prowling his apartment like an angry panther, tail flicking and teeth bared. He wonders if Kame is done with him.  
  
When he’s halfway home, he gets an email from Kame.  
  
 _Come home,_ it says. _I’m sorry I lost it._  
  
Jin nearly sobs with relief. When he walks in Kame is waiting on the couch with a glass of wine, all wrapped up in a fluffy cardigan, looking washed out and exhausted.  
  
Jin hesitates in the doorway; he wants to cross to Kame and hug him and make everything okay between them again, but he can’t lie, either. “Me leaving was the right thing to do,” he says. “I wish it didn’t have to hurt you, but–“   
  
“Jin,” Kame says, drained and scratchy-voiced. “Stop.”   
  
“But–“ Jin starts, but Kame cuts him off.  
  
“Seriously, stop,” Kame says. His limbs are spread bonelessly, as if he just can’t move anymore. “I know.”   
  
Jin exhales in a rush and sits next to him, not touching him but close enough to feel the heat of his body.   
  
“It’s just harder now,” Kame says after a while. “It was easier when you weren’t really talking to me anyway. Not to miss you.” He looks ashamed of himself. “I don’t want to sing _Real Face_ with stupid Nakamaru.” He’s looking at nothing, into the darkness of the kitchen. “I sound better with you.”   
  
“We can sing together,” Jin promises, wrapping his arm around Kame’s shoulders. He crawls closer until he hangs off him like a gigantic monkey.   
  
“Whatever,” Kame says, as if it is nothing and he has not just had a very loud and longwinded bitchfit over it. He buries his face in Jin’s neck. “I’m tired.”   
  
They go to bed and he’s asleep before Jin has even covered them with the blankets. When Jin wakes at 6am, he is already gone, but there’s an email waiting on his phone: _I’m proud of you._  
  
—  
  
Ever since they became friends again, Jin has been leaving playlists on Kame’s iPod. When the first one appeared way back in June, Kame was on the shinkansen and he stared at it in confusion, wondering what the hell _hot joints_ was and how it got on his iPod without his knowledge. Then he’d opened it and found a long list of Lil Wayne and Snoop Dogg songs and its origin had become clear. When he emailed Jin about it, Jin had replied, _gotta expand ur horizons. i deleted like 5gb of crap, too. who needs that much elton john shit?_  
  
Now, whenever he heads out of town for work, he finds a new playlist. At first it had all been gangsta rap that Kame knew was about drive by shootings and evading the cops without even bothering to find translations for the lyrics. After they started hooking up, though, the tones turned rosier, love and sex and happiness creeping in amongst the violence. Kame likes these playlists best. Sometimes, when he has to stay overnight in hotels in Sendai or Fukuoka or wherever the hell he is, he listens to them while he falls asleep, wondering what Jin is doing back in Tokyo. If he’s in a club somewhere dancing to this song and thinking of Kame.   
  
When he particularly likes a song, he’ll call Jin and make him translate the lyrics. Jin says he could just google them, but Kame likes it best hearing what Jin thinks they mean. He doesn’t really care what Kanye West meant when he wrote _Lost in the World_. He just wants to know why Jin listened to it and thought of him. It embarrasses Jin, but that just makes it better. He makes Jin talk even when he can hear the blush manifested in his voice, when he has to stutter and stammer over his words.  
  
He is never more certain that Jin loves him than he is in those moments.  
  
—  
  
Jin goes with Kame to Kobe when he has to cover the Orix Buffaloes. He wanders around on his own while Kame is working, and then they spend a night at a nearby onsen. It is the longest break Kame has had from work in forever, and he’s selfishly glad he convinced Jin to accompany him. They lie around in the onsen for hours, then retire to their room, where the staff have already laid out futons. Kame laughs when he sees that they have been set up on opposite sides of the room.   
  
“Guess they don’t have any suspicions about our relationship being inappropriate,” he says, sitting on his bed. When Jin sits on his, there is about five metres between them. When they were kids, KAT-TUN used to have to share a room this size between all six of them. They often barely slept because Jin wouldn’t shut up.   
  
“This is to protect me from your advances,” Jin says, fastening the belt more securely around his yukata. “They can probably tell you’re a pervert.”   
  
“I guess I better keep my hands to myself, then,” Kame says, folding his hands beneath his head and stretching out on his back. He closes his eyes and listens to the trickling water outside, the muffled sound of laughter from down the hall. He’s not surprised when he feels his sheets rustle and the weight of Jin’s body settling against him, thighs either side of his hips. He slides one hand around Jin’s bare calf.   
  
“Shh,” Jin murmurs, as if Kame is making a lot of noise. “The walls are thin.”   
  
“You’re the noisy one,” Kame says grumpily, but props himself up on his elbows to more comfortably return Jin’s kiss. His brain tries to remind him of Johnny’s demand for him to be more careful, but he is honestly at the point where he could care less. He spent so long worrying about the sky falling that he has started to think, _fuck it, let it fall if it wants_. It never does.   
  
They make love in near silence, eyes open and mouths closed. There’s something funny about it and the hardest part is silencing their laughter, but then Jin opens his mouth on Kame’s belly button and that gets easier. He just has to concentrate on breathing. When they first started sleeping together, Kame had been well aware that Jin’s pliant obedience would only last as long as it took for him to find his feet and then he would be as bossy and domineering as ever, and he has not been disappointed. Jin holds him down with one reassuring hand on his stomach, murmuring in pleasure at Kame’s acquiescence. Jin isn’t always in charge, but Kame enjoys it when he is. He presses his gratitude out in kisses on Jin’s shoulder.   
  
Jin falls asleep in Kame’s futon, their limbs all tangled in white cotton sheets. They wake to the sound of activity in the halls outside. Jin tries to coax Kame back to sleep, but Kame wants to visit more of the city before they leave, maybe take Jin to the amazing restaurant he’d visited the last time he was here. He showers alone and when he comes back Jin has elaborately messed up the untouched futon. It looks more like a restless child slept in it than a grown man. The pillow is inexplicably in the middle of the mattress, but the beans show a perfect head-shaped imprint.   
  
“Rough night?” Kame asks. The futon they actually slept in looks pristine in comparison.   
  
“I had nightmares,” Jin replies, kissing Kame’s temple on his way to the shower.  
  
They spend the day wandering around Kobe, not really doing much. Kame takes about a billion photos, more of Jin’s hair blowing messy in the freezing wind than of the city itself. The restaurant he’d wanted to visit isn’t there anymore, so they end up eating at a ramen stand by the water, warming ice cold hands on steaming bowls of soup. It’s a good day. It almost feels like they’re just a normal couple, except for the way that people automatically get out their cell phones and take photos or write messages to their friends as they pass.   
  
They take the last shinkansen back to Tokyo, sharing a carriage with a lot of tired looking middle-aged salarymen who could care less who they are, if they even recognise them. Jin disappears to the smoking carriage once or twice, rolling his eyes when Kame lectures him about cutting back.   
  
Kame bought a stack of magazines at the station and he makes his way through them slowly, playing music through one ear of his headphones. Jin plays Bejewelled on his phone for most of the trip, slumped against Kame’s shoulder like a bored child. He keeps asking Kame where they are and poking through his numerous shopping bags, accusing him of trying to buy omiyage for everyone he has ever met and eating the shrimp senbei that are supposed to be for Nakamaru.   
  
The magazines are mostly boring, but Kame finds the new love of his life in a women’s lifestyle magazine. He elbows Jin to show him the house cat that looks like a lion, all sandy, golden fur and blazing mane exploding around its face. It is some fancy new designer breed, genetically engineered the old fashioned way. It costs almost two million yen. It’s the cutest thing he’s ever seen.  
  
“I need one,” he tells Jin, who keeps staring at it, face blank.  
  
“Do you even like cats?” he asks after a minute. It seems like he wants to say more, but doesn’t.  
  
“I love all animals,” Kame says.   
  
Jin frowns. “What about Ran and Jelly?”   
  
“They’ll be fine,” Kame assures him. He has visions of all three of them napping together and having adorable little battles like the cats and dogs on YouTube. Ran will be like a mother to little Aslan.   
  
“You’re like barely at home to look after it,” Jin ventures.  
  
Kame frowns. “Cats aren’t so needy.”  
  
“It’s _two million yen_ , Kamenashi.” Jin is scowling down at Kame’s adorable baby like it is some kind of hideous monster.   
  
“It’s only money,” Kame says. He doesn’t know why Jin is being so weird. “Why are you being all grinchy?”   
  
Jin huffs and Kame takes out his phone to jot down the name of the breeder listed in the article.   
  
Kame doesn’t understand why, after such an idyllic trip, Jin turns into a stranger upon their return. Jin kisses him goodbye in the car and goes back to his own apartment, and Kame doesn’t hear from him for two days.   
  
—  
  
 **05:45:** _Good morning We’re doing a shoot at Disney today_  
 **10:00:** _A little kid just threw up in Nakamaru’s lap it was awesome  
 **10:05:** _They gave Nakamaru new pants to wear they’re covered in little Disney characters everyone made fun of him but I kind of like them…_  
 **12:24:** _Are you still asleep? Fucking lazy, Akanishi They made us leave Disney already_  
 **14:17:** _Nakamaru said I could have the Disney pants They’re kind of tight tho lol_  
 **18:37:** _Are you coming over tonight? I’m gonna make omurice I’m getting off early-ish._  
 **21:16:** _I guess not._  
 **23:27:** _Is something wrong? I tried to call…_  
 **01:07:** _Goodnight_  
 **04:32:** _It’s so eaaaaaaaaarrrrrlllllllyyyyyyyyyy_  
 **10:09:** _I just saw your brother on tv_  
 **13:25:** _Seriously, what the fuck is going on?_  
 **19:19:** _Did you lose your phone again?_  
 **22:10:** __  
  
**03:19** _josh found my phone down the back of the couch lol sorry i wanna see ur disney pants__  
  
—  
  
The email wakes Kame when it comes. He stares down at it, feeling uneasy. No way Jin could go 48 hours without compulsively checking his email, even if he had to do it on his computer instead of his phone. Or his iPad. Or his iPod Touch. Or his old iPhone 3GS, which he discarded the second iPhone4 came out. Or the bedazzled Blackberry Kame has seen in his glovebox. Out of everyone Kame knows, Jin is the least capable of cutting himself off from technology.   
  
Kame scrubs his face anxiously and leans over to the dresser, where Jin left Kame’s laptop the last time he was over. Kame himself hasn’t used it in a good month and it takes him a minute to remember the password. Jin set a scrolling slideshow of himself “looking awesome” as the desktop and Kame stares at his stupid, beautiful face as Firefox starts up, until it disappears behind the blank white expanse of the Google homepage. Apprehensively, he loads Facebook, exhaling sharply, annoyed with himself, when he realises he had been holding his break.   
  
It doesn’t take long to find what he was looking for, less then five hours ago, on Josh’s stupid status update with a bunch of photos of delicious looking food.  
  
 _Big Jim Redmond likes this._  
  
Kame scowls and scrolls down the page, stomach tying itself up in knots as he reads his feed and sees the stupid cowboy Jin uses as an alias over and over down the page. _Big Jim Redmond is bored. Big Jim Redmond likes PLAYAS GON PLAY. Big Jim Redmond is now friends with Nakayama Takeshi. Big Jim Redmond likes John Thompson’s profile picture._  
  
Kame rests his chin in his palm and stares at the screen despondently, wondering what the fuck is going on. Things had been so good between them, other than that one stupid fight that neither of them has mentioned since. Staring at the evidence that Jin has just been avoiding him and unable to think of a single reason why, he feels miserable.  
  
Angrily, he types a name into the search box and becomes a fan. He goes to sleep feeling a little thrill of vicious satisfaction that he wishes he had outgrown.  
  
 _Caoimhe Gonzalez likes Saito Naoki._  
  
—  
  
Jin almost explodes when he sees it. It takes him a good thirty seconds for his brain to make the connection that Kame has obviously realised Jin has been avoiding him and has not bought his story about losing his phone at all. Before that he feels overcome with jealousy and betrayal, and he leaves a comment on Kame’s wall that says, _saito sucks_.   
  
Kame replies an hour later with an encyclopaedic account of Saito’s baseball prowess, a glowing list of his stats stretching back to high school. _Plus, he is a snappy dresser,_ it says at the end.  
  
 _he has a stupid face_ , Jin says. A few hours later, Josh likes Jin’s comment, but Kame never replies, and Jin starts to wonder if he’s done irreparable damage to their relationship, which isn’t what he wanted at all.   
  
At 9pm, though, Kame emails him and says, _Are we still going out tonight?_ and even though it isn’t followed by any of the stupid hearts and kisses that would usually punctuate Kame’s first messages of the day, it makes Jin feel better to know that Kame hasn’t written him off completely and has not yet made plans to meet stupid Saito Naoki in a Kabukicho love hotel.  
  
 _yeah,_ Jin replies. _see you then_.  
  
—  
  
Jin is still weird when Kame shows up at the club. He’s trying to pretend he isn’t but Kame knows him so well that he can’t miss the slight hesitation before his friendly hug hello and the way that he squeezes himself onto the sofa between Josh and Ryo even though he and Kame could have just shared the red leather love seat that is usually Jin’s favourite spot in the whole venue. Ryo looks at Kame over his beer and Kame just shrugs, because he honestly doesn’t get it either. Ryo sighs and leaves the overcrowded couch, slumping at Kame’s side. Kame spends all night staring at Jin, who spends all night conspicuously not looking at him. After an hour of horrible awkwardness, Kame departs for the dance floor, where Kusano corrals him into a circle of enthusiastically terrible dancing. Kame does the robot for a crowd of appreciative drunks, then lets Kusano teach him some kind of elaborate barn dance he must have learned in America. It’s good to have his mind taken off Jin’s weirdness, until Jin touches his arm out nowhere and says in his ear, “I’m out of here.”  
  
Kame nods and follows him off the floor. He grabs Jin’s elbow. “Just let me get my coat,” he says, nodding towards the cloak room.   
  
Jin frowns, looking young and frustrated and trapped. “You should stick around,” he says. “I’ve got an early call.”  
  
Kame’s heart plummets and he has to stop himself from throwing a tantrum here, because there are so many people around. Who cares if Jin has an early call? He certainly doesn’t usually, he shows up for work on two hours of sleep all the time. It’s not even like they even have to do anything. They could just sleep, like normal, and then Kame could get up when Jin did and make him coffee and they could talk, a bit, before Jin went to work. He could see Jin off at the door in his dressing gown like a housewife. Jin usually likes that.  
  
Kame does not usually think of himself as the clingy type. Usually, Jin could go a week without seeing him, if he needed, two weeks, three weeks, maybe even a month. But he can’t stand the thought that Jin doesn’t even want to see him. That they could go home together right now if Jin wanted, but he doesn’t, and won’t tell Kame why.   
  
“Fine,” he says, turning to storm off. Jin catches his sleeve and pulls him back for a one armed hug that just makes Kame feel worse.   
  
“I’ll see you soon,” Jin promises, hand clasped around the back of Kame’s neck. His finger strokes the bare skin behind his ear. Then he leaves, and Kame wonders if he is being dumped.


	7. Part 7

Jin avoids being alone in private with Kame for a week, with flimsy excuses about having to work or having to visit his mother or Josh falling potentially fatally ill. He still sees him every few days, but he always makes sure they have a chaperone, and it is obviously grating on Kame’s nerves. He’s not very good at hiding things from people, especially from Kame, and whenever Kame touches him he flinches in fear that everything will just come pouring out of him.  
  
On the eighth day, he gets a voicemail.  
  
“I’ll be out of town for a week,” it says. “I think when we get back we should talk about what it is we are looking for in this relationship and find out whether our objectives are complementary.” There’s a slight, faltering pause, and he finishes. “I probably won’t be in touch before then.”  
  
He sounds clipped and businesslike, not at all like the person who dances around his kitchen in his underwear singing the theme music from stupid old shoujo anime into his wooden spoon. The knowledge that Jin has made him so miserable that he might feasibly lose him makes him crumble in on himself and he mopes around his apartment in his sweats, eating Josh’s disgusting American cereal out of the box and listening to weepy love songs. A few times, he tries to call Kame, but the call goes straight to voicemail.  
  
He calls in sick to work and doesn’t shower or shave or wash his hair for almost three days until Josh comes over, takes one look at him, and forces him into the shower. Jin feels a bit better when he gets out, though that doesn’t really mean much, just that his mood has been upgraded from “suicidally depressed” to “totally miserable”. Josh hands him a beer and they sit in silence on Jin’s balcony, looking out over the hills. Jin remembers when they did this a few months ago, and Josh called Kame C3P0. Jin’s faggy little robot. He holds back a sob.  
  
Finally, Josh looks at him, scratches his sandy head, and ventures, “Did you break up with Kamenashi?”  
  
Jin chokes on his gasp and splutters all over their feet. Josh just blinks back at him.  
  
“You…” Jin wheezes. “YOU KNOW ABOUT US?” He narrows his eyes. “Did Pi tell you?”  
  
Josh snorts. “What makes you think you’re any less obvious with him than you ever were with any girl you had a thing for?”  
  
Jin blushes. “I am not obvious,” he says. “You’re just nosy. You’re like my stalker or something.”  
  
“Whatever,” Josh says. “It was kind of weird but you seemed all happy and shit so I didn’t say anything.” He tears the label off his beer. “But now you kind of seem like you might throw yourself off the Rainbow Bridge, so I figured we should have a chat.”  
  
Jin miserably thrusts his fists in the pocket of his hoodie. “I’m not gonna kill myself,” he says, then slumps dramatically in on himself. “Yet. Ask me again on Sunday.”  
  
“What’s Sunday?” Josh asks.  
  
“That’s when Kame gets back from Okinawa,” Jin says. His voice breaks as he adds, “And he’ll probably break up with me.”  
  
Josh makes a face, all scrunched up and skeptical like he thinks Jin is being a gigantic drama queen. “I don’t know, dude,” he says. “I don’t know him that well, but he seemed pretty into it.” He claps Jin on the shoulder. “I don’t think he’d break up with you just like that.”  
  
Josh doesn’t understand.  
  
“I fucked everything up,” Jin confesses. He knows he sounds like a whiny, pathetic loser, but he can’t help it. He is a whiny, pathetic loser. If there was ice cream in his freezer he’d eat the whole tub.  
  
“He fucked up before, though, right?” Josh asks. “And you forgave him.”  
  
Jin snorts. “Great,” he complains. “Maybe six years from now Kame and I will live happily ever after.”  
  
Josh scowls. “You’re really annoying right now.”  
  
“Now you’ll leave me too and I’ll die friendless and alone,” Jin says. “One of those old people in an attic somewhere, rotting away while Kusano keeps collecting my social security cheques.”  
  
“Jesus,” Josh grimaces. “Go get dressed, retard, we’re going out.”  
  
It takes Josh more than an hour to convince Jin to comply. They go to eat Korean barbecue and Josh watches in disgust as Jin eats like a whole cow. Then they go to the club where Kusano works and Jin gets shitfaced and sits in the corner with a Brazillian model talking about her ex-boyfriend and how crap and confusing men are. In the early hours of the morning, Jin realises that one of the biggest mistakes he has made in this whole transition into being kind of gay was not acquiring some fag hags who can help him out with his troubles and he ends up spilling out the whole story. Alegria puts her hand on his knee and coos over his hurt feelings and tells him everything will be ok. It’s pretty good, like talking to his mom, only she’s also really hot.  
  
She convinces him to go to karaoke, where they drink cosmopolitans and sing every mopey, desperate break up song in the book, including _Achy Breaky Heart_ and _All By Myself_. He finishes with _Kizuna_ and is drunkenly grateful that she doesn’t say anything about the fat tears that roll down his cheeks as he sings.  
  
He wakes up the next day with a terrible hangover and huge gaps in his memory and an encouraging email from Alegria telling him to take every day as it comes and that she’s praying his man will come back to him. He’s embarrassed, but that doesn’t stop him from calling her so they can talk about his feelings some more. Josh seems relieved that he’s found an outlet other than him for his whining. Jin is relieved too. No matter how supportive Josh is trying to be, talking to him about his gay love life is still sort of weird.  
  
The relief lasts until he walks into the conbini to stock up on smokes on Friday morning and sees the headlines plastered across the new issue of _Friday_ : _Akanishi Jin caught on steamy Roppongi date with foreign model_ , complete with blurry cellphone pictures of himself huddled together with Alegria in the bar and the pair of them drunkenly stumbling into a taxi.  
  
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, _fuck._  
  
—  
  
Kame knows he must seem pretty pathetic because Ueda calls him “buddy” when he awkwardly enquires about his mental wellbeing. That Ueda would notice his distress at all indicates that he must be doing a really hopeless job of covering it up; Ueda is usually wilfully oblivious to these things, which is how Kame prefers it. It’s kind of weird to have him looking at him in concern. It makes him feel like a cancer patient.  
  
“Just tired,” he tells him, who looks like he feels equally dubious about Kame’s honesty and relieved that they don’t have to talk about it anymore. After that, Kame resolves to do a better job of hiding his misery. He’s a balanced, capable person, now. They don’t sit around moping when a relationship falls apart. He certainly didn’t when he broke up with Hitoshi, and they were together for two years. Plus, his relationship with Jin isn’t even actually over yet. All this worry might be for nothing. He decides to put it out of his mind. They’ve got work to do, anyway. They are in Okinawa to film a new PV and to take photos for this year’s tour pamphlet. He doesn’t have time to sit around moping.  
  
All that is fine, while they are working. On set, he is the same old Kamenashi, consummate professional who gets shit done. It’s just after work that he’s the loser who sits alone in his hotel room in the dark, sniffling and listening to the playlists his boyfriend made him and refreshing his Facebook feed over and over like a stalker. He fantasises about Jin showing up at his door, telling him he wants to marry him. Jin showing up on set and confessing his love in front of everyone. Kame falling in love with a beautiful Italian racecar driver on the beach and Jin sobbing through their wedding ceremony, clutching Josh’s arm and crying that he never should have let him go. This last one is only momentarily satisfying, because Kame can’t imagine a version of himself that isn’t in love with Jin. The guy marrying the racecar driver would have to be a stranger.  
  
The worst part is probably that he knows Jin does love him too. He’d have to be stupid not to recognise that; Jin isn’t exactly known for his inscrutability. Just a few weeks ago, they’d been so happy, and then Jin suddenly got all weird and distant and Kame can’t help but think that Jin had suddenly realised – seemingly out of nowhere – that maybe love wasn’t enough, in the long term, to make up for everything he would lose.  
  
He’s relieved to get up and go to work every morning, even if he has barely slept. He’s relieved that they work so late that they all just go to bed when they’re done, and no-one tries to coax him out of his room to look around town or get drunk and meet some locals. He pulled his usually unacknowledged rank to get a hotel room to himself, even though he usually hates that. He doesn’t want them asking questions that he can’t answer, but they do, every time they look at him in that infuriating way, as if he’s still 19 and breakable, 20 and just barely holding himself together. He’s not like that anymore. He’s wounded and heartbroken but it’s not like he’s going to die.  
  
He’ll just keep on living as a broken shell of a man.  
  
He snickers at his own melodrama, but there is something comforting about dwelling on the worst case scenario. He lies in the dark, hugging a pillow, and imagines growing old alone while Jin has a dozen beautiful half-American babies with the woman of his dreams. She is blonde and has enormous breasts. He imagines Jin asking him to be the children’s godfather. Their tiny little faces, just like Jin’s, but with blue eyes instead of brown. That is usually his breaking point. She will never love Jin like he does. Those should be his children, he thinks angrily, tossing emphatically onto his side and burying his face in his pillow. He falls asleep to the sound of their imaginary voices in his head, singing obnoxious, happy little songs, and calling him Uncle Kame.  
  
A few times, Jin calls, but Kame is still mad that Jin was being such a dick before he left, and that Jin had all those babies with that American bitch and left him to die alone, so he doesn’t answer. He’d meant it when he’d said he wouldn’t be in touch for a week; Jin needs at least that long to figure out what he really wants. Kame needs that long to figure out how long he’s willing to wait.  
  
They finish up the PV on Thursday night and spend Friday wandering around Okinawa in ridiculous military costumes while a team of photographers scurry around them to catch their every facial expression. The others seem to find it embarrassing to appear in public in their stage costumes, but Kame finds it comforting, somehow. The Kamenashi that wears this sweeping coat with its enormous shoulder pads and swinging chains isn’t afraid to answer his phone in the middle of the night. He isn’t afraid of anything. This guy would have Jin barefoot and pregnant already. So to speak. Kame throws himself into the role.  
  
By the end of the day, he is exhausted, and he refuses when the others suggest a trip into town for dinner, the first opportunity they have had for sightseeing all week. Koki spends about half an hour sitting on the end of Kame’s bed trying to weedle him into coming along. Kame sits against the pillows pretending to complete a Sudoku and gently rebuffing him until finally snapping, “I said I don’t feel like it, what is so hard to understand about that? Do you need me to put it in song?”  
  
Koki loses his temper and grabs Kame’s collar, shouting, “What’s wrong with you? Did Akanishi do something?”  
  
Kame scowls. “It’s not always about him.”  
  
“Yes it is,” Koki scoffs, and stomps out of the room, slamming the door behind him like an infuriated teenage boy. Kame feels bad, because if there is anyone who is always looking out for him, it is Koki, but he can’t make himself get up and follow him. Tomorrow, he’ll sidle up to Koki and throw an arm around his shoulder and everything will be okay between them again. Koki will forgive him, no questions asked.  
  
Jin keeps calling, and Kame stares at the phone vibrating around on the bedside table for a while, then puts on the tv and watches a documentary about baby meerkats. About half an hour after Koki’s exit, Taguchi walks in without knocking, PSP in hand.  
  
“Hey,” he says, and crosses the room to settle on the bed next to Kame. He crosses his legs, elbows resting on spread knees. Kame assumes that Nakamaru and Koki sent him in here to babysit, but he doesn’t say so, so it’s okay. He smells clean like soap. They don’t really talk much. Occasionally, Taguchi will squawk and elbow Kame to show him his apparently miraculous new high score, but for the most part he doesn’t say much. Kame watches his meerkats, and then an animal rescue show. He curls closer to the warmth of Taguchi’s body. It reminds him of being a little kid and watching scary movies in Yuichiro’s room while his older brother studied calculus and ignored him.  
  
The phone keeps buzzing.  
  
Taguchi glances at it and asks, “Aren’t you gonna get that?” but doesn’t push when Kame shakes his head. Eventually, Kame picks it up and looks at the register; one missed call from his mother, ten from Jin, and three from Josh that probably represent Jin’s attempt to go undercover.  
  
There is an email, too. It says: _answer ur phone, its an emergency i swear !_  
  
Kame frowns and takes the phone into the bathroom. He sits in the empty bath in all his clothes, drawing his knees closer to his chest when Jin’s tired voice greets him at the other end. It has been six days since they last talked and Kame has missed him desperately.  
  
“How have you been?” Jin asks, voice thin with hesitation.  
  
Terrible, Kame wants to say. He wedges one of his feet under the other and ignores the question. “What’s the emergency?”  
  
Jin is silent for such a long time that Kame says, “Hurry up, I can’t wait forever.” He pauses, and adds, fraudulently, “I’ve got big plans.”  
  
“With who?” Jin asks suspiciously.  
  
“People,” Kame snaps, then, after another silent few seconds, “I’m hanging up.”  
  
“Wait,” Jin says. “Seriously, wait.” He takes a deep breath. His next words come out all at once, crashing together like a five car pileup. “IwantedtotalktoyoubeforeyousawFriday.”  
  
“Friday,” Kame repeats. “Like the magazine?”  
  
“Yeah,” Jin confirms miserably. He sounds like a child who is sure he’s about to be sent to bed without dessert, part penitence, part obstinate rebellion.  
  
Kame is lost. “Why…”  
  
“Because I didn’t want you to be mad,” Jin says. It’s like pulling teeth.  
  
Kame closes his eyes and presses his fingers to his temple, feeling the dull throb of his pulse. “Why would I be mad?”  
  
He wonders if _Friday_ has photos of them, on the day they spent in Kobe, maybe, or from the cinema that time. They haven’t been anywhere near as careful as they should have been; though why Jin thinks Kame would blame _him_ for that when this sort of thing has _always_ been Kame’s responsibility, he doesn’t know.  
  
Jin’s voice makes it clear that he expects Kame to lose his shit, words dribbling out hesitantly at first, then rushing to a panicked crescendo. “Because they published all these stupid photos, but I was just _talking_ to her, they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about!”  
  
“Oh,” Kame says. “Talking to who?”  
  
“Alegria,” Jin says, as if that is supposed to mean anything to Kame. After a minute he adds, “She’s like my new bro, but she’s a girl. But _Friday_ made all these SPURIOUS ALLEGATIONS just because we were TALKING, and…” His voice cracks awkwardly and Kame imagines him hunkered down in his beanie and sweats. “I just didn’t want you to believe them, that’s all.”  
  
Kame considers this for a minute, wondering what he would have thought if he’d seen the headlines on the newstand instead of hearing about them from Jin.  
  
“ _Friday_ once reported that I was quitting my job to marry a porn star,” he says finally. Jin doesn’t seem to know how to answer that. After a minute, Kame adds, “I promise I won’t ever be mad about something I read in a stupid tabloid, Jin. I’m not an idiot.”  
  
Jin doesn’t say anything for a minute, but he sounds relieved when he does. “The photos look _really bad_ ,” he says, like he just wants to get that out there, so Kame can’t say he didn’t warn him.  
  
“Okay,” Kame sighs. Honestly he doesn’t really like thinking about Jin getting close enough to some girl for the paparazzi to take incriminating photographs of them together, but he knows Jin well enough that Jin wouldn’t call him up just to lie about it. Even if he was planning to break up with him anyway. Maybe especially then.  
  
“I have to go,” Kame says. “Those people are waiting for me.”  
  
He thinks of Junno sitting out there on the bed. He wonders how much of this conversation he heard.  
  
“Oh,” Jin says, sounding a bit disappointed, which makes Kame’s heart twist painfully with hope. He can hear the sound of Jin’s unsteady breath. “I miss you.”  
  
Kame can’t say anything. He squeezes his eyes shut tight, hand clamped over his mouth. He’s not going to cry, but it kind of feels like he might just literally break open and fall apart.  
  
“You’ll be home on Sunday, right?” Jin says.  
  
“Right,” Kame manages.  
  
“I’ll be waiting,” Jin says, then just stays there, breathing on the line, until Kame hangs up.  
  
—  
  
Jin really is waiting when Kame gets back. On Saturday night, he goes out with his friends and tries to have a good time but he isn’t really in the mood, so he uses his spare key to let himself into Kame’s place at three in the morning. He crawls like a stalker into Kame’s bed with its silky green sheets. He clutches Kame’s gigantic stuffed Ponyo to his side and stares up at the stars projected across the ceiling, joining the dots into elaborate constellations. He barely sleeps; he is awake long enough to see the artificial night sky fade into day.  
  
He spends most of Sunday afternoon curled up in the kotatsu, trying and mostly failing to work. He turns on Kame’s aroma pot and stereo, sighing as sandalwood and terrible music fill the air. It makes it feel less like breaking and entering. There is no food in the fridge and he is starving, but he is too afraid to go out in case Kame comes home while he is gone; he is irrationally terrified that if he misses him now, he might never see him again. He finds some stale prawn crackers in the back of the pantry and eats them all. At nine o’clock, he finally gives in and orders a pizza.  
  
Kame finally gets in at almost midnight, fresh from taping this week’s _Going_. Jin scrambles out of the kotatsu, trying to make it look as if he just got there and hasn’t been waiting for hours. Kame has stopped on his way home and picked up the dogs from his mother; Jelly slips her leash and runs over to Jin, jumping insistently on his back for attention. He pulls her into his lap and buries his face in the fur on the back of her neck, murmuring hello. He is glad for the distraction.  
  
“You’re here,” Kame says. Jin can’t tell from the tone of his voice whether he is pleased to see him here; mostly he sounds exhausted. There are dark circles under his eyes and an explosion of tiny pimples around his chin, half hidden by the winding mass of the red scarf around his neck.  
  
“Yeah,” Jin says. He wonders whether he should try to explain himself, but ultimately, what is there to say? “Welcome home.”  
  
Kame scrubs his face and starts to unwind his scarf, pull his gloves off, discard his coat and fancy suit jacket. He looks vulnerable without all the layers, thinner than he really is. “I’ll just make some tea,” he says, “and then we’ll…” he trails off.  
  
“Talk,” Jin finishes for him. He extracts himself from the kotatsu while Kame brews the tea. He goes into the bathroom and washes his face and fixes his hair, running through everything he needs to say; he is really bad at this kind of thing, but it has never been more important that he pull himself together.  
  
When he returns to the living room, Kame is sitting at the dining table, slumped and miserable looking with both his hands wrapped around a chipped black cup. He’s staring into his tea and Jin can’t stop himself from stopping behind him and wrapping both arms around his shoulders, pressing his face into his neck and breathing in his scent, finding the familiar smell of his cologne and make up remover. “Seriously, I missed you,” he breathes, and Kame exhales, shaky and unsure.  
  
“Then why?” he asks, and Jin releases him, easing into the chair at his side. They sit side-by-side at a table for ten people. Jin doesn’t know why the table is so gigantic, he is the only guest Kame ever has over. “You’ve been acting so weird…”  
  
“I know,” Jin says. He wraps his hands around his own cup, trying to find the words he needs.  
  
It takes him so long that Kame talks instead.  
  
“If this is all … too much for you,” he says, eyes on his tea, as if trying to read their fortunes in the leaves. “I get it. I’ll survive. I just need you to be straight with me, and then,” his voice falters miserably, “we can go back to being friends, I promise.”  
  
“It’s not too much for me,” Jin protests quickly. His legs feel weak and shaky with fear.  
  
Kame turns dark, sad eyes on him, and Jin thinks, _Oh, god._ Kame licks his lips and says, “Then what the hell is going on?”  
  
Jin wonders if it still counts as a reasonable, adult discussion if he gets a pillow and hides his face in it so that Kame will stop looking at him like that, like Jin is slowly pulling his heart out piece by piece.  
  
“It was the lion cat,” Jin admits helplessly.  
  
The devastation on Kame’s face clears, and now he just looks confused.  
  
“The lion cat,” he repeats, nonplussed. “What about it?”  
  
“I was really pissed off about it,” Jin confesses. The words are tumbling out of him, now, tripping and tangling in their eagerness to be set free. “And when you asked why I was being so weird about it, I realised…” He huffs, frustrated with himself. “I thought, we don’t need a cat that looks like a lion, our daughter needs to go to a good school!”  
  
Kame’s dark eyes blink catlike beneath the acute angles of his brow.  
  
“Our daughter,” he says slowly.  
  
Jin nods miserably. “So then I realised I was being a creepy weirdo and tried to back it up a bit. But I ended up just making it worse.” He looks down at his fingers, the slightly bumpy curve of his thumbnail, half moon at the base. “Every relationship I’ve ever cared about has ended because I got too serious too fast and scared them away. And you told me that yours always end because people want too much of you.”  
  
Kame stares at him for the longest time, then reaches out and wraps his hand around Jin’s. Jin stares down at their fingers twisted together, his clean, boyish nails between Kame’s buffed and faintly luminescent ones.  
  
“Idiot,” Kame says, looking tired and brave. “Too much for them. Not too much for you.”  
  
“Kame,” Jin says, wonder and relief starting to overwhelm him. He holds Kame’s hand tighter, covers their clasped fist with his other hand.  
  
“Anything you want,” Kame swears. “It’s yours.”  
  
Jin’s heart feels like a jackhammer.  
  
“I’ve known you forever,” Kame says, leaning in until their foreheads press together and their noses bump. “I’ve loved you since I was twelve. I know you’re a creepy weirdo. I want that. I want you.”  
  
“I named our kids,” Jin admits.  
  
Kame says, “That will have to be negotiated,” and kisses him.  
  
—  
  
A year ago, if you had told Kame that he would one day be waking up with his face mashed into Jin’s fluffy hair, dead-armed from the insistent weight of Jin’s head on his arm, he’d have laughed in your face, forcefully pushing away the stubborn remnants of a love on which he had long since given up hope. Back then, even the idea that they might one day be able to restore their friendship had seemed like a foolish dream. He’d given up even thinking about it, refusing to throw his life away waiting for something that would never happen.  
  
He turns more fully into the warmth of Jin’s body, nuzzling his nose into the skin where his neck slides into his shoulder, grinning when Jin sighs and murmurs sleepily. He has to get up and go to work, but it takes him twenty minutes to lecture himself into peeling himself away from Jin’s warm, dozy skin. Jin grumbles in his sleep, but doesn’t wake until Kame comes back from his shower, when he just cracks one eye open and accuses Kame of being a goody two shoes.  
  
“One of us has to be the bread winner,” Kame laughs. He leans over the bed to smooth back Jin’s tangled hair and press his lips adoringly to his temple. “I’ll see you later.”  
  
Jin grabs his wrist to slow his retreat. His face is still buried in the pillow. “I, um.” He cuts off, pulling the sheet higher to obscure his flushed cheeks. “I think you’re pretty good. I guess.”  
  
Kame snickers and nuzzles against Jin’s cheek, making him squirm like an outraged baby. “I love you madly,” he whispers, laughing when a sheet clad arm lashes out and hits him in the nose. Jin’s face is bright red.  
  
“Get the fuck out of here,” Jin cries, pressing the back of his fist against his cheek, eyes wide. Kame is still laughing when he walks out the front door, locking Jin safe inside.  
  
His good mood lasts all day.  
  
He’s posing for a photographer that he has worked with a thousand time. They had planned a kind of tense, moody, suicidal concept shoot for the April issue of Dazed and Confused, all pouting lips and wide, traumatised eyes. What he gets is Kame sitting around in a black t-shirt and ripped jeans, laughing and playing with the raven they’d brought in as a living prop. It’s okay, the photographer says. This is better.  
  
Kame isn’t quite sure what to do with all this happiness. In his way, he’s a schmaltzy kind of guy. All this emotion needs somewhere to go, and he just barely stops himself from making some grand romantic gesture that will just embarrass them both. He calls to order flowers for Jin and gets himself under control just in time. Instead, he sends his mother two dozen yellow roses with a note that says he’s glad to be alive.  
  
He feels as though everything that was shit in the world has been washed clean by the previous night’s happiness. Jin had taken his hand to lead him nervously into the bedroom, pushing him down on the bed with confidence that he obviously didn’t really feel.  
  
“I want you to,” he’d said, slowly unzipping his hoodie, “You know…” Kame had grabbed the waist of his jeans and pulled him close, sliding arms around his back, looking up at him.  
  
“Want me to what?” Kame asked, gathering the fabric of Jin’s hoodie in his fist and tugging until it fell all the way off his shoulders.  
  
Jin frowned. “You know what, you pervert,” he said, kissing Kame to stem the flow of mockery they both knew was coming. He’d pushed Kame back on the bed and crawled over him, not seductively, but in the manner of a roughhousing child, determined and impatient. He’d collapsed to one side and then just lay there against the pillows, looking nervous and expectant. He obviously thought he was being very brave.  
  
“I’m sick of doing all the work.” He crossed his arms, defiantly meeting Kame’s eyes. “It’s time for you to pull your weight, Kamenashi.”  
  
“Okay,” Kame had laughed as he’d pulled Jin’s t-shirt off over his head and pressed a line of kisses over his heart.  
  
“Show me what you got,” Jin had said, looking offended when Kame cracked up with his temple pressed against Jin’s chest. “Shut up,” he whined. “Don’t make fun of me.”  
  
“I’m not,” Kame lied, stretching up to press his mouth wetly against Jin’s cheek. He smoothed his hand down Jin’s neck, turning serious. “Seriously,” he said. “Don’t worry. Just relax.”  
  
“I’m not worried,” he said, melting obligingly into the pillows when Kame started kissing his way down his neck again. “Just don’t disappoint me.”  
  
Kame started laughing again, sitting up. “You’re like the worst dirty talker in the world,” he said, grinning down at Jin despite himself.  
  
Jin scratched his nose. “Sorry,” he said after a minute. “I’m totally nervous.”  
  
“No shit,” Kame said, leaning in until his head is pressed against Jin’s. “Don’t be, it’s just me. Even if you’re really crap at it.”  
  
Jin thumped him on the back. “How could I be crap?” he asked. “You’re crap.” He clasped Kame’s shoulders, scowling. “Get on with it already.”  
  
It wasn’t exactly the most seductive of invitations, but Kame accepted gladly anyway, crawling up Jin’s body until he could wrap his arms tight around his neck. He took it slower than was probably strictly necessary, waiting until Jin was impatiently tugging at his belt before he even took off his jeans.  
  
Later, when Jin was lying sweaty and boneless in Kame’s sheets, looking smug and self satisfied as if he had just endured death defying acts of bravery and not just let Kame make coddlingly slow, gentle love to him, Kame reached out and stroked his damp hair away from his face.  
  
“What are you thinking?” he asked, because it had become clear to him that they were going to have to make a habit of talking about that kind of thing if they wanted to avoid the kind of horrible misunderstandings that had made his life hell for the last few weeks; it doesn’t matter how well they know each other, they’re both such neurotic people that they’re sure to mess things up if they don’t get try to communicate like mature adults. Before tragedy strikes, not in the crumbled wreckage of their relationship.  
  
Jin stretched, rolling onto his back and gathering Kame in a bundle at his side. He stared up at the ceiling, then slowly reached out to flick on Kame’s night sky projector. Kame hid his smile in the curve of Jin’s arm, pressing a kiss to his bicep. Jin used to make fun of the star lamp, but now he’s the one that turns it on half the time.  
  
“I’m happy,” Jin said finally.  
  
Kame fit his hand around the curve of Jin’s ribs. “Me, too.”  
  
The memory of that happiness is still with him now, making him feel tremulous and giddy, a bit like climbing to the top of Mount Fuji and feeling oxygen deprivation making way for triumph. Exhausted, hard-earned triumph. It’s taken him so long to get to this place; more than ten years and four boyfriends, through countless trial and heartbreak. He feels like every trauma he has ever faced was designed to bring him here, to this moment, so he could be strong enough, good enough, for Jin. So that he can hold them together through sheer force of will if necessary.  
  
He is not daunted at the prospect.  
  
He checks his email as he’s being ferried from this photoshoot to another across town. He expects that Jin is up and about by now; he was supposed to go to a meeting with Johnny that he had been dreading, because the old man would no doubt chew him out about how much work he’d missed. Kame had lectured him for a bit, but he knows Jin can’t really help it. He’s never really learned to hide his emotions on camera like the rest of them. If Jin had gone to work this week the papers would have been full of reports about his clinical depression in no time.  
  
He’s a bit disappointed to realise he does not have any emails from Jin, just a couple of messages from Nakamaru and a notification from Facebook, which he reads first.  
  
_Jim has updated his relationship status to say that you two are in a relationship.  
Please confirm this relationship status:_  
  
Kame stares at it, heart thumping, thinking about how stupid and reckless and careless it is.  
  
Then he slowly clicks the link.  
  
—  
  
When Jin sees the little red flag come up in the corner of the screen, notifying him that Kame has confirmed his relationship request, he grins so wide that Josh sighs and tells him to get off the internet and get back to work.  
  
Jin doesn’t care anymore that all his friends are gonna see it and either think he’s in a relationship with a mean looking old lady or know he’s like totally gay now. He doesn’t care that some crazy fan might find it and unmask their ingenious disguises. All he cares about is sticking to Kame like an overgrown leech.  
  
His heart skips a beat of pure, demented happiness as he clicks the thumbs up.


End file.
